Google have updated their Maps with a feature you may find interesting if your business is inside a shopping mall (or your store is very big) – maps of the inside of the building. Rather than showing your location in an “empty” field on the map (or the roof of the building if you’re using the satellite image), your little dot is overlaid on a floor plan of the building.
The feature is only enabled on the Android version of the Maps software but it will surely be rolled out to the rest of them in time. Only a few locations are currently active (none in Canada, only in the US and Japan for the moment), including San Francisco Airport and some IKEAs.
The businesses/buildings in question must submit their floor plan for inclusion, at least until Google figure out a way to get their StreetView vans indoors. This new addition seems to me like it would be most useful at airports since people tend to face tighter time constraints than they do at the mall, and airports are much more difficult to navigate.
Google will of course want to monetize this new addition as much as possible (especially for shopping malls), so we can expect tight integration with Google Places. That opens up opportunities for things like instant coupons for nearby shoppers and other ways of drawing people to your business. The technology is still in its early stages, but it will undoubtedly be useful for marketing in the near future.