Providing Addresses for 4 Billion People Using Three Words (mondaynote.com) 393
HughPickens.com writes: 75% of the Earth's population, i.e. four billion people, effectively "don't exist" to modern computer systems because they have no physical address. The "unaddressed" can't open a bank account, can't deal properly with a hospital or an administration, and can even struggle to get a delivery. Now Frédéric Filloux writes at Monday Note that What3Words, a London startup, is seeking to solve this problem by providing a combination of three words, in any language, that specify every 3-meter by 3-meter square in the world. Each square has a 3-word address that can be communicated quickly, easily and with no ambiguity. Altogether, 40,000 words combined in triplets label 57 trillion squares. Thus far, the system has been built in 10 languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Swahili, Portuguese, Swedish, Turkish and, starting next month, Arabic. All together, this lingua franca requires only 5 megabytes of data, small enough to reside in any smartphone and work offline. Each square has its identity in its own language that is not a translation of another.
Messy addressing systems have measurable consequences. UPS, the world's largest parcel delivery provider, calculated that if its trucks merely drove one mile less per day, the company would save $50m a year. In United Kingdom, bad addressing costs the Royal Mail £775m per year. "One might say latitude and longitude can solve this. Sure thing. Except that GPS coordinates require 16 digits, 2 characters (+/-/N/S/E/W), 2 decimal points, space and comma, to specify a location of the size of a housing block," writes Filloux. "Not helpful for a densely populated African village, or a Mumbai slum." The system is already being used to deliver packages in the favelas in Brasil with Cartero Amigo, solar lights to the Slums in India with Pollinate-Energy and mosquito traps in Tanzania with in2care. For What3Words, the decisive boost will come from its integration in major mapping suppliers such as Google Maps or Waze.
Messy addressing systems have measurable consequences. UPS, the world's largest parcel delivery provider, calculated that if its trucks merely drove one mile less per day, the company would save $50m a year. In United Kingdom, bad addressing costs the Royal Mail £775m per year. "One might say latitude and longitude can solve this. Sure thing. Except that GPS coordinates require 16 digits, 2 characters (+/-/N/S/E/W), 2 decimal points, space and comma, to specify a location of the size of a housing block," writes Filloux. "Not helpful for a densely populated African village, or a Mumbai slum." The system is already being used to deliver packages in the favelas in Brasil with Cartero Amigo, solar lights to the Slums in India with Pollinate-Energy and mosquito traps in Tanzania with in2care. For What3Words, the decisive boost will come from its integration in major mapping suppliers such as Google Maps or Waze.
More likely to be used by drones than post offices (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't imagine this being useful for a post office in developed countries. Drones on the other hand, are going to deliver packages in a back yard and if you can tell the drone search for a place to drop a package in a 3m by 3m square that's definately useful. Especially if there is a designator nearby to better pinpoint the landing zone.
Re:More likely to be used by drones than post offi (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, think this is an example from TFA (Japanese characters removed):
Apparently, in some places addresses can get pretty screwed up.
Re: (Score:3)
Japanese addresses are so generally screwy that it is normal behavior to draw maps when giving directions.
Re: (Score:2)
Japanese addresses are so generally screwy that it is normal behavior to draw maps when giving directions.
Yes, I've heard that map programs for finding addresses are the first thing that Japanese install on their phones. Outside of every train station and otherwise scattered around are maps of the neighborhood that show blocks and buildings with their numbers. See, everything is divided up by Prefecture, City, Neighborhood, Block, Building (floor, office) and numbered in no particular standard order for streets that are certainly not even laid out in a grid pattern. There's no way to find an address without a m
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I can't imagine this being useful for a post office in developed countries.
Japan [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3)
Whichever one you want.
what3words is a word -> lat/long service. It works extremely well for lat/long information. Perfect for saying where your geo-cache is, or even telling people where to meet in the park, or approximately where you are in some rural area. Its not a replacement for an actual address, but certainly can help if you don't have an actual address.
Re: (Score:2)
It works extremely well for lat/long information.
Hardly. There is no easy conversion, you have to go online (or have the database on a smart device) to find out the translation.
Its not a replacement for an actual address, but certainly can help if you don't have an actual address.
Except UTM can easily address down to the nearest meter (or better), is a world-wide global standard (is both known worldwide and applies worldwide), and is found in most GPSs, if not all. For addresses within the same grid square, it is trivial to determine how far away and in which direction the destination is. It uses a global character set and needs no translation from one la
Re: (Score:2)
Which ever one is easiest to remember.
Go explore the map.
I'm at generates.flat.quaking temporarily.
Re: (Score:2)
75% (Score:4, Funny)
75% of the Earth's population, i.e. four billion people, effectively "don't exist" to modern computer systems because they have no physical address. The "unaddressed" can't open a bank account, can't deal properly with a hospital or an administration, and can even struggle to get a delivery.
Because those Kalahari tribes are really desperate to receive pre-approved credit card spam, hospital bills, and their Amazon Prime deliveries.
Re:75% (Score:5, Insightful)
probably not, but being able to easily express which watering hole they're camped next to this week may be useful for the guy hauling ebola vaccine doses.
Re: (Score:2)
Well how else is the non-existent local public or commercial delivery infrastructure supposed to find them?
Not that stupidity again (Score:2, Interesting)
Do you know what the real "lingua franca" is? Numbers. And numbers don't need a fancy encoding that requires the use of a computer to map it back to actual location information.
Re: (Score:2)
No, it's not the first time it's been discussed here, and Yes, it's still cute for about 10 minutes until it dawns on you what an incredibly stupid idea this is.
Unless you're what3words and you're trying to enhance your "oooh! shiny!" revenue stream by conning other services into tying themselves to your system, of course.
Hah. Article's lead image screws up the concept (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.mondaynote.com/wp-c... [mondaynote.com]
Nice job, dingbat. Your image shows an address collision within about 500 metres.
And you need to learn about drop shadows, or at the very least adding outlines to text.
Re: (Score:2)
what about elevation? (Score:3, Insightful)
In a high rise residential building, 3x3 meters isn't precise enough. We also need to know elevation.
Re: (Score:2)
3 words plus one number?
Re:what about elevation? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Wouldn't it just suck to be located at: balls.rust.painfully?
Re: (Score:2)
This is mostly a solution for disorganized places where unit labels don't already exist. If they exist (that high rise building), use them. Doubt you're going to be stacking scrap-metal shacks more than two or three high, and even in that situation you're still identifying a small enough group of people that you can probably talk to all of them at the same time (unlike multiple floors of a high rise) to find the person you're looking for.
Re: (Score:2)
A lot of "organized places" have screwy street names (change names along the route or over time) and numbers (i.e. Japan).
Re: (Score:2)
Kowloon City, if it still existed. There are disused skyscrapers occupied by squatters in various parts of the world, but yea.. generally there'd be a floor number at least.
Re: (Score:2)
3x3 plus an apartment number? You find the building, you can find the sub-section of it. But the point is more for places that don't have solid street names and such, which aren't likely to have high-rises to any appreciable extent...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I remember that last time they covered this (Score:2)
And I still have the same thought: "Hidden Forbidden Holyground".
embarrasing.word.combination (Score:2)
As with all systems that blindly pick words and string them together, you're bound to encounter some that are less than flattering. "danger" and "skunks" appear in one pair of three, etc. Thankfully, this is only a parking lot, but imagine a person's place of residence with something like that.
Ring the Doorbell FFS (Score:3)
bad addressing costs the Royal Mail £775m per year.
So how will this system solve that? A sender can still give a bad address. Most badly addressed mail that I nevertheless get has the postcode wrong, a fairly arbitrary set of letters and numbers. This new system is a totally arbitrary set of words. People do not remember post codes - they copy them from an address book, incoming letter, or database and can copy it wrongly. Likewise, people are not going to remember these word triplets (I've got 50 Xmas cards to send), they will copy them from an address book, incoming letter, or database and can still copy it wrongly. Get one word wrong (I gather pluralisation matters) and it will go to Timbuctoo instead of Kansas.
It would save the Royal Mail and other couriers a lot if their guys actually rang my doorbell when they arrive instead of just posting a "You were out" card through - they seem to have a phobia about it. But I live in a remote scenic area and I think they like the idea of a second morning's relaxing drive this way instead of fighting city traffic the following day.
No address (Score:3, Funny)
What an idiotic system. There already exists a solution to this problem.
Generate an IPV6 address for each 3x3 square. Encode the same address in a chip and implant this chip in each individual who is allowed to occupy the 3x3 space. Any person whose implanted chip does not contain the correct address may not occupy that space and will be subject to immediate detainment and questioning. We can also look into walling off each 3x3 square so that no illegal square immigrants come in.
Do you people have any other problems you need me to solve for you today?
Sincerely Yours,
Donald Trump
problem is no permanent address (Score:2)
If you just need to pin-point a spot on the earth, GPS is your goto method. But as others point out, identifying a spot on earth != usable address for commercial/social/infrastructure purposes.
What about the 3rd dimension? (Score:2)
Do I share my 3 words with my downstairs neighbor?
Cool but looks too closed/proprietary (Score:5, Insightful)
This seems like a cool idea, but are we really going to get the world to start using an algorithm for determining location that appears to be proprietary and closed-source? I was looking to find specifically how it works and as far as I can tell you can only implement this by downloading apps or APIs from what3words, and their closed code will do all the work mapping locations to words and vice-versa.
Why would anyone build any type of important solution or process on top of this and have their hands tied to this one vendor to use it going forward. Its not like you could upgrade or convert to a different process later if your plan was to get people to use this new method for specifying their location.
Re:Cool but looks too closed/proprietary (Score:4, Insightful)
There are also the questions of long-term viability of the company, patents and copyright issues on the three-word locations. On their website they promise the tech will always provide free ways for individuals to use it. And in the case the company can no longer maintain the technology (or find another company to do so), they also promise to release the technology and code into the public domain.
Promise on pricing [what3words.com] page.
That's a lot of promising.
I really like the idea but I'd like to know it's free and open for everyone to use without limitation. Like many things, the market will ultimately decide its fate.
Re: (Score:3)
What the fsck is their technology anyway?
Encode like this [dupuis.me] except with 0.0002 degree precision = 50,000 offsets instead of 10,000,000 so it fits in a short. You now have a 2+2+2 = 6 byte = 48 bit coarse representation of a coordinate. Take a dictionary, number words 1-2^n in binary. I'd say n=16 for 65536 of the 171,476 in the Oxford English Dictionary. You now have 3*n = 48 bits of data. Map. Done. Seriously, that's all.
I think many are missing the point (Score:2)
Hilarity ensues! (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Agreed. I looked and some poor schmuck three hours north of Brisbane, Australia has the address "riding.hustlers.hotel". No joke.
Oblig (Score:5, Funny)
Back in 2013 (Score:2)
An older slashdot story about the same thing
"Describe Any Location On Earth In 3 Words"
http://news.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
dupe (Score:2)
http://news.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
Super Awesome Dragons (Score:2)
I want to go where the Super Awesome Dragons are at! https://map.what3words.com/sup... [what3words.com]
Not viable until it's opened (Score:2)
They would charge companies to use it, which makes it unusable in the bigger picture. If they opensource their algorithm and word list under a good license, this has a chance. Until they do that, this won't go anywhere.
Imagine the big mail/freight carriers having to pay them every time they have to translate a 3 word address. Not going to happen.
Woorld's population (Score:2)
The world's population is 7.3 billion. 75% of that is over 5 billion. How did they get 4 billion?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Let's all go to glorious.leader.shamed (Score:2)
In Mexico:
https://map.what3words.com/glo... [what3words.com]
Wrong order (Score:3)
Putting a "can even" or "can't even" at the end of a list implies that that last option is especially surprising or shocking. However in this case struggling to get a delivery is pretty much a no brainer.
If you want someone to send you something, the person you're asking needs to know where to actually send it. If you can't accurately describe where you are then they have no way to get to you.
Opening bank accounts or going to a hospital on the other hand are things that shouldn't actually require you to have a permanent place of residence, labeled or not.
UPS is a poor excuse for this system (Score:2)
Oh, yes, I could pay them extra money to deliver it someplace else that they ALREADY GO TO EVERY DAY where I actually am during delivery hours, of course. It would cost t
Combination PizzaHut TacoBell (Score:2)
I'm where it's at...
Grids and landmarks (Score:2)
I too thought of my Maidenhead grid square (I'm typing this from CN89lg).
The most generally whacked-out addresses I've seen are in Costa Rica. No house numbers or anything, mail is addressed by landmarks. One hotel I've stayed at had the postal address "300 meters East of the Escazú Country Club, Old Highway to Santa Ana, Escazú, Costa Rica". Mail may be addressed with respect to any well-known (to locals, at least...) landmarks; I've seen stuff that referenced the town square, the bus station,
Re:inefficient (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not when someone in the US has to speak these 3 words to someone whose primary language isn't English.
Words become much harder to comprehend over the phone with someone in India when they are used out of context.
Also, what problem are we trying to solve?
"People without addresses can't open bank accounts"
Well this isn't an address. And people without addresses can't get mail so why would the bank accept this as an alternative.
How could someone ever prove they lived at this 3 word address.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Klaatu, Verata, Nickto.
Re: (Score:5, Informative)
Klaatu, Verata, Nickto.
barada! for Gods sake man, it's barada!
Re:inefficient (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
Either one can be proved the same way: Address a piece of mail to it, and then ask me to produce it in person a week or so later. That will suffice to prove that the address can lead content to me. Anything further, that can't be proved about the address, is outside of the scope of an address's purpose.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
There were different dialing plans..
"In the United States, the most-populous cities, such as New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago used telephone numbers consisting of three letters and four digits (3L-4N)" (from wikipedia)
I'm in the Boston area, so this is what came to mind. But yea, yours is another one of the many variations. 3L-4N was a standard before the whole thing was dropped.
Re: (Score:2)
DUdley1-7xxx. Morphed into 381-7xxx.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm impressed by the idea, but it won't be fully realized until the language set includes Klingon and Elvish.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If the first word were alphabetical by lattitude, and the second by longitude, and the third very different for nearby squares, this would be a much better system. From the first two words you could get a good general idea where someone was, and the fourth would act as a checksum.
Re: (Score:3)
"Three, sir!"
"Third! Third would act as a checksum!"
Re:inefficient (Score:4, Insightful)
Even latitude/longitude coordinates give you some clue at all about where they are, which is all this system is attempting to crudely replace.
Where is 'correct . battery . staple'?
Is it near 'stupid . coordinate . system'?
Re:inefficient (Score:4, Funny)
"stupid.coordinate.system" wasn't found, but "silly.mapping.system" [what3words.com] is in northern Texas, between Lubbock and Amarillo.
Re: (Score:2)
The problem being that there appears to be no rhyme nor reason to the three words being used for squares in contiguous space. Use their website to look at a few squares that are all part of the same piece of property - it appears to be completely random.
I'm never going to tell someone that they can find my driveway at 'slope.radioactive.massaging' because they have no fucking clue what that means to anything but this database. Whereas if you tell them some thing like '390 SE Hawthorne St.' they can at least have a clue depending on how the city and addressing scheme works.
I think it'd work best as a way to double up your address--for example, UPS absolutely refuses to deliver to my address unless I write it in a 'weird' way because they can't work out how my apartment complex's numbering system works. (This is impressive in all the wrong ways.) Given that some places don't necessarily tell me who they'll ship my packages through, if I can give them both the address in the form the government puts it and a three-word set, I think it's reasonable for me to be rather annoyed
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
You're missing the point. Words are easier to remember. IP addresses are often shorter than most domain names, but we still use domain names because they can be easily remembered.
news.slashdot.org uses more characters than the ip address 216.34.181.48. You can even remove the dots in the ip address and save some space. Or better yet you can encode the ip address as hex. Now you have an 8 character string vs an 18 character string. I still prefer news.slashdot.org.
Re: (Score:2)
No you can't remove the dots. You can however turn it into a number after doing a little math for each section.
Re: (Score:2)
Words are easy for humans to remember, but they're awful for processing, which is why most of the world switched to numbers a long time ago. Many European cities used to use house names when there were only a few hundred houses in the area, then they switched to using street names and numbers when it became too difficult to keep track of everyone's movements.
Using coordinates allows you to estimate distances just by knowing two locations. You can use them for direct-path navigation, as well as (except for e
Re: (Score:3)
The point can be found at highway.treble.lemon, and you completely missed it.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
DAMMIT! I am at penis.turtle.fatass.
Who thought this shitty system up?
Re: inefficient (Score:2, Funny)
You're just mad because your square is Poopy Smelly Fart.
Re: (Score:2)
I've always thought QTH locator (aka Maidenhead Locator System) was pretty neat gets you really close with few letters DM26PA13VM is a parking at the hoover dam but if you cut two letters off the end DM26PA13 only gets you to the hoover dam.
A 5MB database shouldn't be a problem considering most gps units have had maps in the 1GB+ range for many years now.
w3w however seems to provide high precision with easy to remember phrases such as "start deflects tuxedos"
And you can turn them into jokes.
Why did microsof
Re:So much better (Score:5, Insightful)
It is not a great solution. What happens when you don't live at ground level but on the second , third or 100th floor?
It doesn't factor in altitude.
At least in gps you could add altitude easily enough.
Re: (Score:3)
Then you add "unit N", like you do now.
Re: (Score:3)
As has been pointed out, some of these places are things like the favelas in Brazil ... there's no numbering, it's a chaotic mass of shacks.
The whole point of this is there often isn't a street name, or a street number, or a street, or anything which could otherwise be thought of as an address.
But, hey, keep thinking your 'simple' fix of just including the unit number actually has anything to do with a complex problem.
Re: (Score:2)
If there's no simple street name or number or anything, there probably aren't going to be that many stories to deal with, either
Re: (Score:2)
I mostly agree with your sentiment here - but ideally a new system would be able to address both needs (ie. it could pinpoint a shack amid a bunch of others, but could also identify an apartment in New York).
Regardless of that, I'm skeptical how well this system would work overall for many of the target populations for some of their applications (most importantly, delivery). How stable are these populations and their structures? How secure are they? I mean, in the developed world, if someone answers the
Re: (Score:2)
In a case where there's enough floors to make a lot of difference there's also likely to be enough footprint that the coordinates of your actual location are not useful; the coordinates of an entrance to the structure plus supplementary information on how to navigate inside are what's needed. There are cases where that supplementary information is not already there and you do want actual lateral coordinates, but even in those cases "X, Y on second floor" is going to be more useful than "164 feet above sea l
Re: (Score:2)
At least in gps you could add altitude easily enough.
By adding another number, right?
So just add a number to this scheme.
I live at purple.monkey.dishwasher.59
Re: (Score:2)
I live at purple.monkey.dishwasher.59
And what is that in Portuguese? Or Swahili? Imagine the fun of trying to transliterate, or even communicate, a Chinese "three word" address.
Re: (Score:2)
I was just addressing the altitude problem. Buf if you insist on shoe-horning in your scepticism, no-one's claiming this idea is going to replace GPS coordinates for every use, and it's not meant to be cross-language. That doesn't make it entirely useless.
Imagine the fun of trying to transliterate, or even communicate, a Chinese "three word" address.
It's probably quite easy if both people understand Chinese. I understand there are quite a few people in the world who do.
Re: (Score:2)
That isn't a problem it is trying to solve. I know no one reads TFA, but it's all laid out in TFS.
Re:So much better (Score:4, Insightful)
It is not a great solution. What happens when you don't live at ground level but on the second , third or 100th floor?
If you live in a 100 story structure then you already have an address. This isn't meant to solve problems of another kind.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Sure, but how much brain space does it take to remember "58.169564, -153.170992" versus "leave aura corrugated"?
We're not computers - we remember words and phrases much better than we remember arbitrary number strings. How many bits it takes to store that information in a computer is irrelevant.
Re:Not that much better (Score:5, Funny)
Besides, everyone can use a healthy reminder not to decorrugate their aura.
Re: (Score:2)
But I know that 58.169564, -153.170992 is very close to 58.16957, -153.170988.
How close are pound.banana.hamster and dome.words.zone ? Are they right next to each other, or across the planet? Other numbering schemes are better. MGRS will let you specify general area to exact location. And you can figure out very easily how far points are from each other. I also like zip codes. I know that 22207 is close to 22206. I can get fine grained by going to 22207-2345. Having an 'address' that provide
Re: (Score:2)
For zip codes, it depends a lot on the geography and history. 50061 and 50062 are 40ish miles apart, while 66206 is adjacent to 64114.
MGRS has benefits over lat/lon, but it's back to somewhat arbitrary long numbers, and to at least match 3m it needs 5 digits of easting and 5 of northing, plus the 4 characters for grid and square, so the benefits are not huge.
This system does require machine translation, granted; if you're trying to avoid that, then this system will definitely not work for you. But if you as
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not sure why human memory vs computer storage needs to come into play here at all. Are all the delivery drivers memorizing these 3 words for delivery, or are they instead written down on the parcel or a manifest and checking against a computer system??? Seems the latter is more likely. Do the people at these addresses intend to stay at their location which would justify a sane simple numbering system. Or, will they roam around like nomads picking up their tents and/or makeshift housing every so of
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Four digits gives 11m squares, which is close enough for anyone making deliveries to figure out the exact location within that square. If you want a 5th digit, you now have precision that can tell the difference between trees.
Twin four-digits aren't hard to memorize, and there's not as much of a benefit for bringing it down to 3x3 squares.
Re: (Score:2)
The giver of the data will probably have used it enough to have it down pat. The receiver, on the other hand, may not, and words are more resistant to transposition errors than coordinates.
Re:Not that much better (Score:5, Funny)
Neither [mozilla.org].
Re: (Score:2)
It's not really unambiguous: http://www.getzipcode.us/en/in... [getzipcode.us]
Meaningful words are also likely to cause idiots to start political wars.
(Though even meaningless stuff, such as in this case, may be at risk of dipshit politicians if it ever takes off).
Also, most places this is intended for have little in the way of any nameable thing, including cities.
Re: (Score:2)
11 alpha numeric characters to memorise, or 3 words? Hmm.
Re: (Score:2)
11 alpha numeric characters to memorise, or 3 words? Hmm.
If you tell me your lat/lon coordinates, I can tell immediately what part of the world you are in, and with a simple map I can get it down to a much closer approximation.
To do that with 3-words, I'd have to memorize not just 3 words, but 57 quintillion combinations of those three. In multiple languages.
The poor fellow who is waiting at the water hole for his Ebola medicine is going to have to learn a lot more three word combinations just to describe his normal daily routine than I would every have to mem
Re: (Score:2)
You are in luck! Your three words are:
off.the.radar