OK, I've read the page, I have no idea what this is, does, or solves. An excellent example of a glossy, gorgeous landing page that does not do what it's supposed to.<p><i>Added in edit:</i><p>The title here on HN makes it clear - but if someone, anyone, goes to that page, even if it is a problem they need solving, how do they know that they solve the problem! Having something, anything, like:<p><pre><code> No physical Address?
No problem!
We make it easy to get
together even when you
can't give an address.
</code></pre>
And I <i>am</i> partially in that market, for reasons I can't explain too much. That's why I went to the page based on the HN title. But there is nothing, <i>nothing</i> on that page that tells me what it is I'm creating. And it doesn't even let me click the "create" area on the screen - it could at least pop up a hint.<p>This is intended as useful feedback - I'm saying what I found frustrating, and in some sense what I need to see. I'm trying to help them see from a fresh perspective things that need changing. That fact that most hipster pages are slick, gorgeous, but ultimately similarly frustrating is a bonus.<p>And before you say that the younger generation at whom it's aimed will understand, remember that it's the middle to older generation who generally have much, <i>much</i> more disposable income.
Thanks for all for the feedback, we clearly need to work on our website messaging!<p>To be honest, we just pulled together the website last week; we weren't quite expecting this attention... but bring on all the early feedback!<p>To try to help explain in a little more detail what we're up to...<p><i></i>* Problem <i></i>*
The lack of physical address system is a huge problem here in Kenya. Here is the GPS trail of a fast food delivery rider that we tracked recently in Nairobi: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIaBTJxdddY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIaBTJxdddY</a><p>He went 462% further than he needed to because there was no clear destination address. Imagine what that's doing for business efficiencies and customer experience? Imagine that track is not a delivery motorbike but an ambulance.<p>Last week an ambulance driver told us he was so lost earlier in the week that he spent 20mins in a 500m radius trying to find the house. Unfortunately when he arrived, the casualty was dead.<p>This is happening 1000s of times a day all over Kenya and other emerging markets around the world.<p><i></i>* Solution <i></i>*<p>The short/honest answer is that we don't know yet. The longer answer is our vision.<p>We believe that at OkHi we can build the next generation of an address system. A system that can truly scale in countries like Kenya and beyond.<p>Imagine OkHi as a simple address book on your phone that allows you to easily create a digital equivalent of a physical address. You also have access to the addresses of family, friends and useful businesses.<p>With the OkHi address book, you can now securely share or receive addresses to:
- ensure the ambulance trying to find your mum's house doesn't get lost
- help the pizza delivery restaurant get food to you still piping hot
- be confident that you're not going to be late for your first interview<p>Exactly what an OkHi address is, we don't know right now. GPS will be part of it but not all of it. Each week we're running lean experiments to try to find out.<p>We're super keen to get everyone's input and ideas so comment away or ping me directly at timbo@okhi.co.
We spent 2 years trying to solve this very problem at Addy.<p>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.<p>We decided to switch gears months ago.<p>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.<p>I am excited to see how things go for OkHi.<p>Ultimately, though, I think this problem is best solved by someone like Facebook. Why they haven't done so yet is beyond me.
I thought that What3Words.com had a clever solution to this problem but they just didn't seem to get any traction. They simply sliced the planet into billions (trillions?) of pieces geographically and assigned 3 words to each square meter space. This allowed someone to say "meet me at foggy banana stovepipe".<p>Some of the downsides was that it only used the english language and that the next square meter over might be "purple dolphin bug" so there was no intuitive relation between square meter locations in any region.
Also wondering the same thing. I know the problem well but not sure how Okhi works. I am getting sick of all these hipster pages that all look the same!
Ireland also has this problem: <a href="http://www.myloc8ion.com/news/rabbitte-reversed-decision-to-proceed-with-national-postcode" rel="nofollow">http://www.myloc8ion.com/news/rabbitte-reversed-decision-to-...</a><p>I remember reading that there were multiple competing systems being proposed for national adoption, and some kind of controversy about which was the easiest to use. Can't find a reference at the moment.<p>I can't possibly see it working without government adoption; it's really something that needs to be part of the public service infrastructure.
Having lived in Kenya for the past year and a half, I can say that this is definitely a problem. Addressing isn't just an issue for people but also for efficient delivery systems. FedEx drivers get a route sheet when they get in the truck in the morning. This is generated by computer algorithm to be super efficient (i.e. fewer left turns across traffic than right turns with traffic).<p>This simply isn't possible without low-level addressing. I hope OkHi can get this solved.
It is good to see someone trying to solve real problems instead of problems programmers have when building a new framework for developing web-deployment tools.<p>But, this really should be a P2P network with a petname system or something like that.
I think they're competing with <a href="https://addy.co" rel="nofollow">https://addy.co</a>
A thing to note: while it might seem redundant in the USA...sharing a location with someone in many parts of the world is difficult.
Hmm this is interesting. I could see the value in other developing countries like Nicaragua where there are no street signs anywhere. Directions are "100 meters from the chicken shop, take a left"