Ahead of his visit to Australia for his keynote address at GeoNext, Steven Ramage from what3words discussed the significance of simplified addressing across a broad range of industries and countries.
As what3words Director of strategy, Steven sits on the board of directors contributing to the long-term direction of what3words. At next week’s GeoNext conference, he will discuss the broad array of applications of what3words’ innovative addressing system, a platform for communicating the location of every 3×3 metre area in the world using only words instead of numerical coordinates.
“We all use words for language everyday,” said Steven. “The nice thing about what3words is that users can discover or share 3 word addresses using a language they’re familiar with.”
“I’ve seen first-hand how long it takes to set up national addressing systems, and quite often those solutions are over-engineered with long reference numbers that work in theory rather than practice. With what3words there’s already a system in place, it’s universal and it can work bottom-up or top-down.”
In his keynote address next week, Steven will provide examples of where what3words is being applied in the real world, including with government, the United Nations and different market sectors. He also sees the case for what3words to be valuable in Australia.
“The Australian Bureau of Statistics stated that only approximately 11% of the Australian landmass is addressed,” he said. “So what does that mean for the rest of the landmass? A lot of people travel, whether Australians locally or tourists, or businesses working within Australia – how do those people communicate location? Do they all use GPS coordinates? I don’t think so as it’s quite a difficult, error-prone process for people who aren’t professionals.”
Steven envisages a future in which what3words can deliver simplified addressing for many other parts of the world as well: “We aim to cover a number of countries in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia-Pacific and provide addressing for entire countries in these regions. We also aim at providing what3words for people in the supply chain, such as logistics companies and couriers, as well as large NGOs or humanitarian organisations who can use what3words to make it easier to deliver aid or save lives during natural disasters.”
“Whether through improving operational efficiencies, saving lives, or having humanitarian aid reaching people sooner- all of these areas are things that a 3 word address can help with.”
Steven has a wide working knowledge within the geospatial industry, giving him a wealth of experience in the future direction of addressing systems. He has been involved in the location industry since the early 90s with the initial uptake of differential GPS with Oceonics (now Fugro). He was the first market development manager for the Wireless and Internet division in Navteq in Europe (now Nokia HERE) and then spent almost 10 years at 1Spatial where he was part of the Management Buy Out team. He worked as an Executive Director of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) where he helped to communicate the value of international open location standards, and most recently he was Managing Director of the international division of Great Britain’s national mapping agency, Ordnance Survey. Today he’s a Director of what3words, a senior consultant for the World Bank and a Visiting Professor at the Institute for Future Cities at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland. He’s also a Fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS).
Steven will be travelling to Australia to deliver a keynote address at next week’s GeoNext conference, which will be held at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on Wednesday 19 August 2015. The conference’s aim is to highlight fresh innovation in a conference program centred on “Location Information, Intelligent Transport and the Smart City”.
