Monday 28 March 2016

Goodbye To Long Addresses, Just Three Words Will Take You To Your Destination

I am sure it might have often happened to you that despite having the precise address you are not able to reach your destination or you know the precise place that you need to reach but unable to explain or express to another person the location or how they could reach there. What fun it would be if you could simply utter three words and that could prove to be adequate and would make you reach your destination. Well it is not in the realms of fantasy anymore! A new app, What3Words (W3W) caters to exactly this service.

What Is What3Words (W3W)?
So first and foremost let’s understand what you understand by What3Words or W3W? Well essentially it is an application that runs equally efficiently on Android, iOS devices as well as the web to streamline your address searching woes and might as well become the most accurate form of looking for addresses worldwide. It uses essentially just three words and is being touted as the ‘new universal address system’. Designed to make finding an address easier, this searching methodology is based on location points and claims to give you the closest possible directions globally.

How Does What3Words Work?
This app is designed by a start-up that is based in UK and aims to provide accurate coordinates by dividing the geographical area around the world into multiple squares. Essentially the entire planet is divided into roughly 57 trillion squares each measuring 3m x 3m. Each of these squares are then allotted a unique 3 word address. And the best thing is this format will work effectively wherever the location is searchable on Google Maps.

Be it buildings, residential locations, parks, monuments or any other location, just about no place is too far away or hard to trace on What3words. Once you feed in the said address, you’ll be informed about the precise words that are allocated for the specific square and will enable you to reach the exact location without too much of a hassle through the App. As every square gets three words assigned to it, conveying it to people becomes simpler and three words are all you need to tell people when you are describing the address to them through messages or phone calls.  The added benefit is that you can share this through multiple channels like Twitter, Facebook or email.

The question that might bother you is can three words really explain your exact location. At the very behest let us then understand the brilliance of this app does not lie in guiding one to a known landmark like the Buckingham palace or the Louvre Museum. It is about looking for places and searching successfully for locales that need you to remember minute details and small landmarks and just about never feature prominently on Google Maps. They are about locating small nooks and corner that are most times is a pain to locate even for many who might be a regular to that place.

Even locations that often might not have name or postal address or bare minimum details or just the postal code to it can become approachable with What3words. Remote rural locations that were hitherto unapproachable can now be spotted. All you need to do is drag and drop a specific point on a map even a hilltop or a hut or a distant field and you will instantly get the three keywords that will enable you to create a traceable address for it and share with others who might need to reach the same locale.

What3words fixes these three word addresses on the basis of GPS coordinates and assigns relevant name or words to them to enable identifying them. This could be even relevant for a distant campsite or an industrial location or remote outreach positions which now become easy to locate with the help of this app.

Do You Need To Pay To Use What3words App?
The major part of the service offered by this app is absolutely free as they have devised a simple way to monetise and make it profitable for the founders. This service to metise it is known as OneWords. All you need to do is take any of the 3 assigned words and assign a single word to it. Pretty simple and novel, this is a simple measure to make it a profitable business for the founders. For example if you have salon in a rural locale you could call it as Harry’s Hair Solution preceded an asterisk. This simple task will cost you a meagre amount of $1.50 per year but can often become the best publicity option for your sagging business in a rural location and can often help people who might be visiting the area and are frantically looking for the service.

Language Options
Suddenly when you are discussing a global solution, one question that might bother you is what if you do not understand English or what if you go to an area where English is not spoken by all and you need to share the address with some people who do not speak the language?

Well What3Words too thought about this problem. As a result after they received $1.5 m funding for their start-up, they began expanding their services to provide this facility in several other languages also. So what happens is for every square, an addition of a language means addition of a name too. Currently this app is available in English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Italian, Portuguese and Turkish. This has meant there are almost 40,000 words of each language in the overall W3W vocabulary as these words are based on the specific popularity of the word in specific language.

Conclusion
It would not be wrong to say What3Word app that is designed for all popular operating systems and the web is set to change the way we look up addresses globally. It would not just revolutionise the process but also usher in a new era of cool address hunting via an app that would be always on your finger tip. Hence, Market is flooding with various smart apps .

Author bio: Priyanka Chowdary is a professional content writer at Coupon Machine. She has done her post graduation in English from The University of Calcutta and has flair to write articles on Tech, fashion, Health, Fitness, Beauty and Diet.