What 3 Words - What's Your Unique Address?

If you haven’t seen the  What 3 Words app yet, it is worth a look.

They have divided the surface of the earth into a 3m x 3m grid, and created an ‘address’ for each grid cell from three ‘random’ words. A particular grid cell could be ‘fish.happy.red’’ Anyone using that name can navigate to the specific 3m x 3m space.

All the examples that i have seen are english words, although i’ve read that it covers many languages.

In western cities, street names and numbers are well organised and addresses are easy to find. In many developing countries, that’s not the case - street naming and numbering are chaotic and sometimes non-existent. In India, address forms often prompt for ‘landmarks’ such as ‘behind xyz building’ or ‘next to abc hotel’. Google maps pins are often in the wrong place or have the wrong name for the building they should mark.

Having a universal map marker, which is a set of words that are easy to remember and share, could be a game changer.

Even for other purposes, like travel. I remember so many times wandering around outside a museum trying to figure out which of the doors was the correct entrance. Or at a crowded event trying to coordinate where to meet people… “I’m next to the big flag thing, where are you?"

This has so much potential.

I love when people put their brains to creating something actually useful like this, rather than wifi-connected juicers.