![]() ![]() Translations are not direct, as direct translations to some languages could produce more than three words. Wordlists are available in 50 languages, each of which uses a list of 25,000 words (except for English, which uses 40,000 to cover sea as well as land). The company says they do their best to remove homophones and spelling variations however, at least 32 pairs of English near-homophones still remain. What3words divides the world into a grid of 57 trillion 3-by-3-metre (10 ft × 10 ft) squares, each of which has a three-word address. What3words originally sold "OneWord" addresses, which were stored in a database for a yearly fee, but this offering was discontinued as the company switched to a business-to-business model. In 2015, the company was targeting logistics companies, post offices, and couriers. The Mercedes A-Class, launched in May 2018, became the first vehicle with What3words on board. In September 2022, Halton emergency services located an injured climber using the app.In August 2022, Tröstau Fire Brigade used the app to communicate a location to the Wunsiedel mountain rescue service.In July 2022, Baldwin County, Alabama, dispatchers used the app to pinpoint a capsized kayaker, with responders saying that they "were within 50 yards and couldn't see him because of the conditions in the water".In October 2020, the Singapore Police Force asked two lost 14-year-old boys to download and use the app.In February 2020, Ambulance Tasmania in Australia sent a link to locate an injured bushwalker.In September 2019, the Scottish Ambulance Service used the app to share the location of an injured hillwalker with the coastguard.Support has also been added to the Australian Government's Triple Zero Emergency Plus App. As of September 2021, more than 85 percent of British emergency services teams use What3words, including the Metropolitan Police and London Fire Brigade. Since 2019, What3words has seen adoption by emergency services, who can use it for free. In March 2021, it was announced that ITV plc had invested £2 million in What3words as the first investment in its media-for-equity scheme. In the year ending December 2021, the company lost £43.29M. In the year ending December 2020, the company lost £16.09M. By January 2020, the company had reached 100 employees and raised over £50M from investors. In the year ending December 2019, the company lost £14.5M and had reported assets of £24.7M. In 2018, the company had a turnover of £274,000 and lost £11M. In January 2018, Mercedes-Benz bought approximately 10% of the company and announced support for What3words in future versions of their infotainment and navigation system. In November 2013, What3words raised $500,000 of seed funding. The company was incorporated in March 2013 and a patent application for the core technology filed in April 2013. He credits a mathematician friend for the idea of dividing the world into 3-metre (10 ft) squares, and the linguist Jack Waley-Cohen with using memorable words. Sheldrick tried using GPS coordinates to locate the venues, but decided that words were better than numbers after a one-digit error led him to the wrong location. Sheldrick and Ganesalingam conceived the idea when Sheldrick, working as an event organizer, struggled to get bands and equipment to music venues using inadequate address information. The company has a website, apps for iOS and Android, and an API for bidirectional conversion between What3words addresses and latitude– longitude coordinates.įounded by Chris Sheldrick, Jack Waley-Cohen, Mohan Ganesalingam and Michael Dent, What3words was launched in July 2013. What3words differs from most location encoding systems in that it uses words rather than strings of numbers or letters, and the pattern of this mapping is not obvious the algorithm mapping locations to words is copyrighted. For example, the front door of 10 Downing Street in London is identified by ///. The system encodes geographic coordinates into three permanently fixed dictionary words. It is owned by What3words Limited, based in London, England. What3words is a proprietary geocode system designed to identify any location on the surface of Earth with a resolution of about 3 metres (9.8 ft). ![]()
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