The Maps of the Week

Google Business Photos has been a huge innovation on Google Maps in the last two years. Being able to provide indoor Street View imagery of business premises has proved very popular acorss the globe.

If you own a restaurant then Google Business Photos is a great way to showcase your restaurant to potential customers. The restaurant GOSP in Denmark has taken this concept a stage further and actually developed an indoor Street View table booking system. Not only can potential customers take a tour around the restaurant in Google Maps Street View, but if they like the look of a particular table then they can click on an overlaid marker and book that table for lunch or dinner.

The Google Business Photos Booking System was developed by Big-e, an e-business online development team. I can see a huge potential for such a booking system not only for restaurants but for booking stadium and theater seats.


John F. Kennedy was assassinated 50 years ago in Dallas, Texas. ESRI has put together a 3d map of Dealey Plaza in Dallas, that should keep conspiracy theorists busy for the next 50 years.

JFinteraKtif includes 3d buildings, the route of the president's car, the Grassy Knoll, the trajectory of the bullets fired from the sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository building and even the trajectories of some of the conspiracy theory shootings.

The map was created using information from key witness statements and is overlaid with photographs taken at the time. Links below the map allow the user to view the map from the point of view of key positions (e.g. from the position of the Grassy Knoll).


I've been linking to a lot of Torque powered maps over the last two weeks. Carto DB's Torque library is a great way to animate large amounts of data on Google Maps.

CartoDB has created another superb example of the library in action. CartoDB's map of Nine Years of Tornadoes in the US animates through NOAA's National Weather Service data. The map includes a neat playback control that allows you to view the animation chronologically or select to view the data for any month.