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posted by martyb on Monday November 02 2015, @10:35AM   Printer-friendly
from the http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIJBUZm1HoY dept.

When it comes to telling someone an address, words beat numbers and letters.

One company is betting that using words to designate a location might be a whole lot easier and quicker in a digital world than using Longitude and Latitude or street addresses. While their system seems unlikely to be widely adopted it does have a certain appeal when combined with a smartphone. Passing addresses to drivers on the road (or friends for a party) can be kind of tricky. Unless you can send it electronically, the chances of remembering a spoken address is slim, and remembering longitude and latitude long enough to write it down or key it into your GPS is zero.

However remembering browser.tapes.outing or limbs.pinning.honk is pretty easy. You don't even have to write them down. Hint: click satellite view to see what those places have in common. You can keep three words in your head long enough to key them into an app, and zoom directly to the address on your smart phone.

The system was developed by What3Words and is already being used in Geographical Information Systems, and other earth mapping applications where there aren't convenient ways to exchange geo-coordinates verbally.

what3words is a universal addressing system based on a 3mx3m global grid.

Each of the 57 trillion 3mx3m squares in the world has been pre-allocated a fixed & unique 3 word address.

Their geocoder turns geographic coordinates into these 3 word addresses & vice-versa.

Using words means non-technical people can find any location accurately and communicate it more quickly, more easily and with less ambiguity than any other system like street addresses, postcodes, latitude & longitude or mobile short-links.

People's ability to immediately remember 3 words is near perfect whilst your ability to remember the 16 numbers, decimal points and N/S/E/W prefixes, that are required to define the same location using lat,long is zero.

The company says "We want to give everyone in the world the ability to talk about a precise location as easily as possible." (And by "Give" they mean "Sell".)

There are free Android and iOS apps available from Navmii allowing users to navigate using a simple 3 word address.

Will it catch on? Betteridge says no, but if Google or Apple takes an interest it might become "a thing".


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 02 2015, @12:36PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 02 2015, @12:36PM (#257453)

    Their FAQ says:

    We have taken out offensive words and homophones (e.g. sale & sail), and have shuffled all of our similar sounding (e.g. plurals) 3 word locations as far away from each other as possible so it’s obvious if you have made a mistake. It’s better to be 400 miles out than 1 mile out so you know instantly that you’re wrong and don’t set off to the wrong place!
     

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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by VLM on Monday November 02 2015, @01:08PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 02 2015, @01:08PM (#257461)

    We have taken out offensive words

    Talk about taking all the fun out of it.

    • (Score: 1, Offtopic) by Thexalon on Monday November 02 2015, @04:34PM

      by Thexalon (636) on Monday November 02 2015, @04:34PM (#257574)

      More to the point, context can determine when a word is "offensive" or not. For example, a well-known word beginning with the letter "n" is offensive if you're making jokes, probably not particularly offensive if you're singing rap, and probably necessary when discussing history or Mark Twain. And that matters: You can't say the full name of the group NWA, or one of its most popular songs, without saying "offensive" words.

      George Carlin was right about the basic problem: A lot of people try to censor the words people use to express offensive thoughts, rather than trying to deal with the offensive thoughts. It's not the n-word you need to be opposed to, it's the racist who's using it!

      --
      The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
      • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday November 02 2015, @04:46PM

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 02 2015, @04:46PM (#257584)

        I suppose offensive phrases can be generated using individually acceptable words. I have not found any "fun" phrases yet despite all kinds of experimentation. Someone is apparently filtering phrases, not just words.

        I suspect they're going to have fun with google bombing type issues, like if someone tried to buy the link "meat.is.dog" or "enjoy.your.salmonella" for the local Chinese takeout place without their approval.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 02 2015, @04:04PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 02 2015, @04:04PM (#257544)

    Oops, sorry that our missile hit your house. It was supposed to hit a target across the globe, but the operator accidentally used plural instead of singular.