This is something we will eventually support, absolutely, but our first release won't include this as a configurable option. That being said, we plan on making travel restrictions a first-class setting soon after launch. Feel free to email me directly if you wanna chat some more :)
We spent 2 years trying to solve this very problem at Addy.
While there are a few dozen products in the space (the pretty, the hacky, the I'm-hopeless-let-me-cease-and-desist-you-on-no-grounds-whatsoever), none so far has managed to create enough of an incentive for consumers to switch. This is absolutely key to any success in the "personal addressing" market, I really cannot stress this enough.
We decided to switch gears months ago.
We created beautiful, easy to use tools for "addies" to be shared just about anywhere, and spent many months in back and forth with government, e-commerce and logistics companies. We knew our assumptions had to be right. Hell, we even built our own maps and collected on-the-ground data that nobody else had, to further enrich these addies with human-readable descriptions in different languages (and built an API around this). All of our efforts, however, did not make enough of an incentive for consumers to adopt our product, even with extreme geofocus and localization.
I am excited to see how things go for OkHi.
Ultimately, though, I think this problem is best solved by someone like Facebook. Why they haven't done so yet is beyond me.
I think the difference is your market though. Was Addy US focused? In Kenya, desperately describing the color of the tree in front of your gate to an Ambulance driver as a loved one lays dying is a very realistic situation. With poorly signed streets and no number system to speak of it seems to me there is plenty of incentive.
Absolutely not, we were very much Middle East and Africa focused, in fact we've lived in many of the countries where we were going to market. We were in SF physically, but had on-the-ground teams in 15 cities.
Perhaps you all just mistimed the market. With smart phone penetration and 3G coverage steadily increasing, maybe two years ago there just wasn't the existing user base to make it feasible. If that were the case you'd also have to incentivize the purchase of smart phones and data plans (which is always a difficult sell).
However, the need is glaring and I refuse to believe there is no incentive for people to find a better solution. Happy to listen to a counter argument though.
Look at the most advanced markets suffering from this problem: GCC countries.
Most of their residents have the very latest devices, are at least as tech-savvy as your average Western consumer, and have disposable income. We conducted hundreds of different experiments, and most of them led to the same conclusion: pain by itself is not enough. These are people that have suffered from the issue extensively (including myself for many years), yet are unwilling to engage in a significant behavioral change. Investors feel exactly the same way, and I am talking about the very best with partners who were raised in some of these countries.
I am not saying that we tried everything, but I think we were extremely exhaustive, often employing city-specific growth/incentive tactics akin to those used by many successful companies in these regions.
It's a super simple problem to solve. There are hundreds of solutions out there. The people, thus far, have wanted none. I think I know why, and I am keen to share our findings, ultimately, though, there really is no better way to convince yourself than to find out directly, by getting your hands dirty.
We'll see how it pans out. Maybe you should speak with Timbo at OKHi and share some thoughts with him. All I know is it's a glaring problem, government's aren't going to address (pun partially intended) the issue, and it will be solved somehow. The technology is simple, but so often in these markets, the execution is complex. With you all being spread across 15 cities and based in SF I'd imagine it contributed somewhat to missing the mark (on top of being a difficult problem in the first place).
Yeah, there's no way to tell. Nobody has succeeded in the space so far, and that's because it is extremely hard to draw people in with "a functional address" as the main premise. Even if it's an address with which to do things that weren't possible before, it's still an address, and it's boring as fuck. Nobody cares about address update feeds, or any other gimmick you'd find in Foursquare's garage.
I am pessimistic but excited as a technologist and entrepreneur. Maybe there's something us and many others have missed that the team here will see. Myself, I would definitely look more in the direction of services like M-Pesa and Facebook than e-commerce or government. That's my two cents.
There are a number of problems that we are addressing with Addy. First would be the lack of actual functional addressing in much of the world. While there are different figures circulated about this, we believe that about half of the world doesn't actually have postal addressing systems capable of performing as well as those of more developed countries. Granted, links generated from various mapping platforms could still be sent around, with or without proper addressing. However, these links are not able of being consumed by 3rd parties in any reasonable way, and so integration is our second goal. We want our users to not only have complete control of their location data in a robust, machine-readable fashion, but also that they be able to use these very location data just about anywhere. We like to think of it as though it were an oAuth dance of sorts, where you can grant access to location information with various levels of precision and/or duration. There are many positive side effects to this, and one of the more apparent ones is definitely what happens when you move homes. Finally, we have taken it upon ourselves to build the very best maps for this other half of the world, along with navigationally-relevant data. That is, if people in a certain region use landmarks as informal reference points, we believe that we ought to capture all of these, on the ground, and surface them through an easy-to-use tool in their local language that allows them to structure the very unstructured location data they were using before to share their where across contexts. Whether we'll get all of these right really remains to be seen, and it certainly isn't trivial, but this is nevertheless our vision and we think that we can realize it by looking at the issue of global location data in a holistic way, as we have been doing for the last year and a bit.
You really need to get the app to see how big a difference professional voice actors make. Imagine if this became ubiquitous, and we could click on a Umano button right from our favorite outlet's site, switch tabs and listen to the article as you code away!
Sure did. Got ours in a couple of days ago. So excited! And I agree, our video could have been so much better. There are three of us and unfortunately we couldn't be together for the filming, which makes it look even funkier.
