///blurred.uncorks.barman

Once you’ve read this article you will understand exactly what that means and more importantly where ///junior.facing.eager is. You might even want to go to ///blurred.uncorks.barman - more on that later. In the emergency services world, we’re just as interested in where you are as what problem you have going on be it medical, fire or police. Because if we can’t find you, we are unlikely to be of much help. We meet some interesting people and hear some interesting things and one of the groups I have met with over the last year or so have an amazing application they call what3words. It’s a global addressing system whose sole purpose is to solve the sometimes difficult problem of describing your exact location, simply, to anyone else anywhere in the world using just three words. And it's free.

Before I go any further, I should state for the record that there is no financial (or any other sort of) relationship between myself and the W3W team, I’m writing this short piece off my own bat, and to be completely clear there is no conflict of interest to be declared.

The team at W3W have divided the entire surface of the world into 57 trillion 3x3m squares. Each of those rectangles has been assigned a unique 3 word combination that defines the location of that individual rectangle as distinct from all the other 3x3m squares on the surface of the globe. The genius of What3Words is their realisation that there are a sufficient number of words in the English language to make any given combination of those words unique. Their system works for any language with a sufficient number of distinct words to make the maths work.

These three word locations are easier to accurately remember than a GPS location and easier to communicate – because we’re used to talking in and remembering words. ///junior.facing.eager can also be described as Latitude: -33.856212 Longitude 151.214626. Which one would you prefer? Because whilst much of the world has a street address, there’s a lot of places that don’t. Ever tried finding someone at the beach, or a picnic, or a rock concert?

Where this system really comes into it’s own is navigating your way around an unfamiliar location, or describing that location to a friend in sufficient detail to get them precisely where they need to go. And, well it’s just fun. Last year I went on a hike in the Dolomite Mountains with my great mates Marko and PK. Want to know where we spent our first night? ///blurred.uncorks.barman – you can’t help but feel that the W3W crew have fiddled with the algorithm a bit in some locations, just because they could.

A nicer angle of ///blurred.uncorks.barman - Rifugio Lavaredo

There’s a serious side to all of this though that involves people in distress who don’t know where they are or how to describe it to rescuers trying to find and help them. It might not be this application, or the solution might be something else entirely, but there’s some super interesting stuff going on at the intersection between the capabilities of our technology, smart ways to think, simplicity and actual need.

My name is Paul Bailey. Like or comment on this post if you found it interesting, follow me on Twitter @waambedic, or drop me an InMail if you want to continue the conversation. Or post a picture of your favourite W3W location.