What3words (W3W): an innovative new way for your fleet drivers to find an address?

What3Words is a start-up based in London that has come up with a new system to pinpoint locations in an original and innovative way by dividing the world into, as they claim, 57 trillion 3mx3m square grids, and every square has been assigned a unique and fixed set of 3 words that identify an address in an easy-to-remember way.

It is hardly breaking news that a lot of people, including professional drivers, salespeople, couriers or delivery drivers, sometimes struggle finding their destination for a number of reasons: it could be the inaccuracy of proper addressing systems (as an example, addresses sometimes lead to the main door of a building but not to a specific entrance, so drivers are forced to make phone calls to get additional directions); some places do not have an address at all (or at least not a postal, a street one or a recognized address); or even that when it seems you have finally reached a location thanks to your GPS navigation system, it disengages without you having found the precise place you need. The consequences are often negative for logistics and postal companies, as poor addressing is especially an issue now after the e-commerce boom: it seems every year in the UK, 25 million pieces of undeliverable mail are destroyed due to addressing errors, while in the USA, mail classified as undeliverable as addressed costs the US logistics industry around $20 billion.

The London start-up claims that with the help of the square grid system, each of which has a 3 word signifier, it is much easier to remember an address and precisely find it in a non-ambiguous way as it works the same the world over and is not dependent on postcode or zipcode conventions. According to the w3w team, it would also be easier to share the address in this way, as it doesn’t seems to be common practice to share, for example, GPS coordinates. The service is available in multiple languages.

How did the w3w team come up with this system? The story is quite a fascinating one and could quite easily be the theme for a book or a movie. Chris Sheldrick, the company founder, is also a musician; he identified the problem of vague addresses when he very often saw bands and musical equipment getting lost and wished for a more efficient addressing system. He then met two mathematician friends, Jack Waley-Cohen and Mohan Ganesalingam and, together with them, eventually came up with their first wordlist and later the app creation, and finally the system as it functions today.

We tried to ‘play the game’ ourselves and discovered that our Irish headquarters, based in DCU Alpha, would have the 3 words props.broom.riches. It is then possible to share that location in a number of apps—currently, you can enter that destination straight into Google Maps to get directions or also get it converted into GPS coordinates:

Only time will tell whether this new concept will be successful and incorporated into other systems...