(Roughly) Daily

London tech start-up What3Words has created a new approach to location that could improve lives and economies around the world:

Julius Caesar famously divided Gaul into three parts. [What3Words founder Chris] Sheldrick and his team have gone a little further, dividing the earth’s surface — land, sea and ice caps included — into 57tn 3m-squares, each assigned a unique three-word identifier. What3Words’s entire address is just index.home.raft. Furthermore, a free smartphone app can identify any What3Words location in the world, even if the phone is offline… according to What3Words, 75 per cent of the world’s population has no address; imagine the benefit to an African villager of having Amazon packages delivered as if he lived in a city with a formal postal address. Imagine the benefit to Amazon, too.

Then there are places you would imagine have street addresses, but do not. Japan, for example, is a delivery person’s nightmare: just one complication among many is that homes are numbered according to when they were built. Many Middle East countries’ addresses are famously shambolic. “Dubai expats filling in US tax forms often have to draw a picture of where they live”…

How did Mr Sheldrick, a musician by training, come up with the idea? He was a band manager and had to get trucks of equipment and performers to venues. “It was obvious that postcodes were not fit for purpose. A venue like the Birmingham NEC has one code and many entrances.” He would give 20-digit GPS co-ordinates to drivers for satnavs. When one driver reversed two numbers and ended up more than 50 miles from his Rome destination, Mr Sheldrick decided to take action…

Find your place at “What3Words: new tech that will find any location.”

* real estate agents’ mantra

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As we zero in, we might recall that it was on this date in 1942 that The Alaska Highway (AKA, the Alaska-Canadian Highway, or ALCAN Highway) opened.  Spurred by the bombing of Pearl Harbor in Dec 1941, the highway, deemed a military necessity, was completed at mile 1202, Beaver Creek , when the 97th Engineers met the 18th Engineers.  Originally approximately 1,700 miles long, it now runs 1,387 miles– the difference due to constant reconstruction of the highway, which has rerouted and straightened out numerous sections. Opened to the public in 1948, the road was legendary over many decades for being a rough, challenging drive; the highway is now paved over its entire length.

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