Mongolia has adopted the app for its postal service and Mercedes Benz has included the service in its cars, Search and Rescue units, Fire services and the police in many countries urge people to download the app.
So what is this app and why is it important for you to download it?
Say, you are lost while out trekking in the wilderness, or while driving in a new city, or even if you are caught in an emergency right in town, the app on your mobile device could help rescue crew find and reach you faster.
Called What3Words, the app essentially points to very specific locations on the planet with just three words. Its developers divided the world into 57 trillion squares, each measuring 3 meters by 3 meters and each having a unique, randomly assigned three-word address.
For example, the official residence of the British Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street is marked as ‘slurs.this.shark’, while the area across the road where the press congregate is ‘stage.pushy.nuns’, and our own address for The Times Kuwait is at ‘trusts.winter.dial’.
The app is the brainchild of music industry veteran Chris Sheldrick, who founded What3Words in 2013. The genesis of What3Words could be traced to Mr. Sheldrick’s childhood growing up in rural Hertfordshire, “Our postcode did not point to our house,” he said during a recent media interview. “We got used to getting post meant for other people, or having to stand in the road to flag down delivery drivers.”
A veteran of the music industry, his frustration with postal codes and geographic coordinates grew while attempting to gather members of music bands to meet at specific places for their performances. “I tried to get people to use longitude and latitude but that never caught on,” Mr Sheldrick said.
“It got me thinking, how can you compress geo-coordinates into something much more user friendly? “I was speaking to a mathematician and we found there were enough combinations of three words for every location in the world.” In fact, it took just 40,000 words to map the world.
The company now employs more than 100 people at its base in Royal Oak, west London has seen its free app spread globally in popularity. “It cuts out all ambiguity about where we need to be, and it is possible to deliver much more effective service,” said one Fire and Rescue chief, who uses the app to tackle fires in large rural expanses.
If people do not have the app, emergency services can send a text message containing a web link to their phones. Though that requires a signal, the app itself does not need a phone signal to tell someone their three-word location. The emergency services are urging people to download the free app.
Recently, police in the UK used the system to find a group of foreign nationals who were trapped inside a shipping container at a port which had over 20,000 containers. The group managed to contact the police who told them to download the app and within minutes they were rescued.