Addy: Location, simplified.

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.