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W3W suffers horribly from "call for price". You won't catch Google or Amazon making you call and talk to a human being (on GMT time no less) before figuring out

W3W suffers horribly from "call for price". You won't catch Google or Amazon making you call and talk to a human being (on GMT time no less) before figuring out if you can afford their service. I'm preparing my own version, truly open source (though with a premium component), with the following improvements over W3W: •Length-optimized. If one character sufficiently describes your location, you don't need to tack on extras. A 12-character code with the last two lopped off will be imperceptibly close to the original. •Precision optimized. Every additional character, no matter the value, will result in a location not identical to the absence of that character. •Precision-focused. When a location is precise to the nearest 100km, km, m, or µm, the browser tools make that clear. •Logic-optimized. With pencil and paper, you'll be able to figure out how to go N, E, S, W by X distance by adjusting a particular character. •Spheroid-optimized. The Mercator projection is often held to be an imperialist distortion of the globe, and that's what traditional latitudes and longitudes use. Half the "namespace" of nearly every coordinate system is biased toward the poles. The distance between 89° N, 10°W, and 89°N, 10°E is 38km, but at 1°N, it's 2226km. My system has a simple and clever way to equally represent the dense equatorial regions and the sparse arctic and antarctic regions, and that equals shorter codes. Watch this space.

estomagordo 8y ago
So your solution won't result in "coordinates" easily memorized by humans or easily translated to the very vast majority of map implementations?
- mchannon 8y ago
  Not sure how you got that from what I typed. The fact is the 4 coordinates (two numeric, two with the stupid "N/S/E/W" corresponding with traditional), decimal points, and reverse order from an X,Y coordinate system, are hardly easy to memorize. They're next to impossible to memorize. What part of pencil and paper didn't come across?
  - StavrosK 8y ago
    Because, from what you've described, it sounds like your system will look like base64-encoded coordinates. Ie 39.022874, 21.913384 will be IJASDO, which isn't as easy to memorize as W3W.
    - mchannon 8y ago
      Not base64, but similar. I think "IJASDO" would be way easier to memorize than person.guards.gangs (I will definitely give W3W credit for picking unintentioned yet humorous word combos), particularly if English wasn't my first language. If you disagree with this logic, explain to me why automobiles' license plates should use W3W-style. ("idiot-driver-honk"). Wait, was that first one persons.guards.gangs? persons.guard.gangs? You'd think if you were one off in the dictionary it would still get you where you needed to go, but no. W3W is a clever product. Mine is also clever, and this industry will never have one-size-fits-all, and that's ok. W3W has a not-so-clever marketing approach. I doubt plus.codes would have ever seen the light of day if W3W had a more FAANG-style approach to marketing.
      - solidasparagus 8y ago
        > I think "IJASDO" would be way easier to memorize than person.guards.gangs Completely disagree. No way 6 arbitrary letters is easier to remember than 3 arbitrary words.
      - jjeaff 8y ago
        Random letters are objectively much harder to memorize. 6 letters is essentially 6 words with one syllable each. W3w approach is only 3 syllables and much quicker to say. You would also have less issues where a pause is required. Like JA vs J ... A to keep this letters from sounding like one.
  - mvexel 8y ago
    Perhaps an example would have helped. With numeric coordinates relative orientation is fairly intuitive. It's simple arithmetic. How does your proposed system replicate that?
pojzon 8y ago
Would you mind to share a github or its still private wip ?
- mchannon 8y ago
  github.com/mchannon/hashsite
afiori 8y ago
> My system has a simple and clever way to equally represent the dense equatorial regions and the sparse arctic and antarctic regions, and that equals shorter codes. > With pencil and paper, you'll be able to figure out how to go N, E, S, W by X distance by adjusting a particular character. Topologically speaking, I am intrigued :)
EGreg 8y ago
Contact me: greg at the domain qbix.com We are currently using geohash and curious why it’s worse than this.
- mchannon 8y ago
  Geohash is easily the best system currently out there. Worse might be a little harsh, but my system: •Packs slightly more bits into the string (naturally there's a tradeoff with data fidelity) for shorter strings •Follows a completely logical alphanumeric distribution (Geohash will skip letters, some for good reason, like o and l, and some for not-so-much, like a) •Some of the other benefits in the original post are also missing. You could probably do this with other systems, but the goal is to allow everyday people to be able to pack a short string in a tweet and have everybody else know exactly where they mean.
  - alasdair_ 8y ago
    >You could probably do this with other systems, but the goal is to allow everyday people to be able to pack a short string in a tweet and have everybody else know exactly where they mean. 89c25855b9b That's the S2 string for a section of Times Square, NY. Usefully "89c25855b" is a well-defined, less precise location comprising a larger area. You can go up or down in levels of precision easily and everything can be stored as a single 64-bit integer with lots of extremely useful properties, (e.g. the use of the Hillbert Curve with all of it's benefits, like localization in address space and real space - see http://blog.christianperone.com/2015/08/googles-s2-geometry-on-the-sphere-cells-and-hilbert-curve/ http://blog.christianperone.com/2015/08/googles-s2-geometry-...) If your system adds more benefits than this, I'd love to hear more about it!
- eruci 8y ago
  Geohash does not provide a one-to-one mapping. Geohashes "u150gxv4" and "u150gxv5" and others, decode to (50.8,4.38). Also, geohashes of many proximal points are very different (see http://geohash.org/f840p2n2p3 http://geohash.org/f840p2n2p3 and http://geohash.org/dxfpzryrzq http://geohash.org/dxfpzryrzq although these locations are 1 meter apart) Also, while geohashes are great for computer storage, they are not so much for human memory.
darkstar999 8y ago
Does it account for geological drifting? This is probably the most important social issue with these kind of systems.
- mchannon 8y ago
  Not OOTB, but I would imagine that any geocoding system could include a suffix, like "(1987)", to know which dataset to use, so as long as there was a server providing accurate geocoding for a particular point in time. This is a service-related question, though, not a method-related question. There's no math equation that'll tell you your house is there when it used to be here.
  - yorwba 8y ago
    The formula might not be elegant, but if you have an exact description of tectonic drift, you can absolutely have a code that refers to a fixed location on its plate, rather than to a point on some imaginary sphere. GPS coordinates are just one possible solution, there's no reason to consider equivalent encodings of the same values as the only alternatives.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > The formula might not be elegant, but if you have an exact description of tectonic drift, you can absolutely have a code that refers to a fixed location on its plate, rather than to a point on some imaginary sphere. Sure, but (1) is there a good way to get an exact description of tectonic drift?, And (2) does tectonic drift account for all shifts of surface features (intuitively, it would not necessarily for features not fixed to bedrock, which accounts for a very large share of interesting-to-humans features)?
      - yorwba 8y ago
        (1) By measuring the location of a few designated landmarks, it should be possible to extrapolate tectonic-level shifts to all other points on the same plate pretty accurately. (2) Changes on a smaller scale, e.g. due to a landslide, are probably less surprising when they cause a change in location codes. On the other hand, there might be some houses on a hill somewhere slowly sliding down, where the system doesn't work. (I also realized that my previous comment can be read as supporting a flat earth theory, especially the part about the sphere being imaginary. I firmly believe that the earth is a bumpy ellipsoid, though.)
alasdair_ 8y ago
> Half the "namespace" of nearly every coordinate system is biased toward the poles. The distance between 89° N, 10°W, and 89°N, 10°E is 38km, but at 1°N, it's 2226km. My system has a simple and clever way to equally represent the dense equatorial regions and the sparse arctic and antarctic regions, and that equals shorter codes. The "S2" geometry system (http://s2geometry.io/ http://s2geometry.io/) is what Google Maps and many other large systems use. It has a small bias towards the poles in terms of some S2 cells being slightly larger than others at the extremes but the bias is pretty minimal. Another system, Uber's H3 (https://eng.uber.com/h3/ https://eng.uber.com/h3/), handles this problem in an even better way, although it loses some of the benefits of S2, such as having fine-grained cells no longer exactly fitting into their parent cells. It has other benefits however. One thing missing from all of these system, including W3W, is that none of them have a height component. If I go to a party in a strange condo and need to call for an ambulance, there is a huge difference between being on the first floor and the fiftieth floor of the same building and W3W does nothing to solve this problem.
- mchannon 8y ago
  The "Z" dimension is something I've been planning on having as part of the system as well. Since people appreciate height from street level differently than raw altitude, both will be accommodated in my system.
  - eruci 8y ago
    Interesting idea. How do you plan to implement Z and up to what height/depth?
donatj 8y ago
You have to call Google for Analytics pricing when you outgrow the free tier. And no, we could not afford it.
- krisroadruck 8y ago
  But at least they tell you that it starts at $150K/year so you know right off the bat if it's even in your ballpark. A lot of SaaS products completely hide thier pricing entirely. I have zero interest in sitting through some sales-bro's phone pitch before I know if I'm even in the right pricing bracket. Nothing like sitting through an hour long preso only to find out afterwards something is 10x what you were looking to spend.
  - donatj 8y ago
    Do they now? They certainly didn't at the time a few years ago. I at the time found some prices online searching around but nothing from them. We were very hopeful we'd get some sort of discount because we're in educational tech, so our income per user is very low, but nope. Free to $100k overnight is insane. We’ve got a guy whose full time job now is basically developing analytics tools for us and it’s a cheaper solution.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - jedberg 8y ago
      Back in the day you you didn't have to pay if you ran a Google Ads campaign. There was no minimum spend. If you ran a monthly AdWords campaign for $1/mo you got free GA no matter what your traffic level was. The main catch is that GA goes to "sampling mode" once your traffic gets high enough, and I think you have to pay extra to get full datasets.
delecti 8y ago
To be fair, W3W is already "spheroid-optimized", in that the named squares are quite close to 10'x10' both at the equator and poles. There are grid "skips" (see one here [1]) every so often to keep all of the squares close to the same size. [1] https://gis.stackexchange.com/a/195696 https://gis.stackexchange.com/a/195696 Also don't discount the benefit of their distribution of the words. If you're using voice input and trying to get somewhere, the system can guess which of multiple inputs you mean. If you're in Louisville Kentucky you're more likely to be trying to get to "captain.water.water" (a ~90 minute drive from downtown) than "captains.water.water" (located on an island in the North Atlantic). Do you have a mechanism (maybe a check digit?) to help with that?
- mirimir 8y ago
  WTF? "captain.water.water" => ~90 minutes from Louisville, Kentucky "captains.water.water" => island in the North Atlantic That's crazy. I mean, "..water" should be a contiguous area. With "*.water.water" a contiguous part of it.
  - delecti 8y ago
    Why? You would lose the ability to disambiguate in the way I described. The words aren't coordinates, they're the result of a hash function.
  - thaumasiotes 8y ago
    The non-proximity of W3W locations with similar identifiers is intentional; it's meant as an easy way to perform error checking. The concept is that you state your location, and if you state it wrong, or the other person gets it wrong, the mistake will be obvious because the small change to the identifier results in a location extremely distant from you. The system pretty explicitly considers all squares equal, without a hierarchy such as you envision. There are no identifiers for larger agglomerations of individual squares. (And more specifically, where identifiers are hierarchical, you generally have the larger scope first, not last. URLs are a bizarre exception.)
    - 8y ago
dexterdog 8y ago
Of course it has "call for price." Look at their team page. There are over 100 people listed. That is absolutely insane for a product of this simplicity. The VCs are clearly making them burn through cash as fast as possible so they can own everything.
carbine 8y ago
this is way off topic but try buying Google Marketing Cloud services. you have to fill out a 'talk to sales' form, no one ever calls you back, and if you call/chat with any other type of support they have zero idea who to connect you to. Google is not exempt from this type of behavior, unfortunately.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
scott_s 8y ago
What benefit do you have over Plus Codes (https://plus.codes/ https://plus.codes/)? I only learned about them from this thread, but they seem to solve the problem quite well, and there's no premium component.
- mchannon 8y ago
  Plus Codes have little application outside building addressing. If I tell you I'm at 4CFM+JW, come get me, you're going to be pretty helpless, because I didn't include the city. Want to shift a little to the east? 4CFM+JX works, but 4CFM+JY? Whoops. How about north or south? Maybe there's a way to do that, but I haven't found it yet. How about upping the precision? The size of the square is maybe 4X the W3W grid cell, but not aware of a way for plus codes to achieve a smaller cell. I'm not out here to bash everybody else's solutions. They're all pretty good, particularly when you limit them to particular applications. Mine just happens to be a slightly improved approach, and slightly less full of drawbacks than everybody else's.
  - Scaevolus 8y ago
    8GC2CMXR+X63 is a global plus code with 3x3m precision.
  - Quanttek 8y ago
    I'm no expert but regarding your question on precision: afaik the longer the plus code is, the more precise it gets
  - Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
    > Mine just happens to be a slightly improved approach, and slightly less full of drawbacks than everybody else's. Honest opinion: it is not. Plus codes is the one that has least drawbacks and most advantages.
    - mchannon 8y ago
      I have a real problem with people giving dishonest opinions, so good on you. But seriously, you haven't seen it yet. Ever read Green Eggs and Ham?
jnaddef 8y ago
It is actually a form of "foot in the door" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot-in-the-door_technique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot-in-the-door_technique. If you see a high pricing on their webpage you might go away immediately. But if you make the effort to calling them, you are already committing yourself and you are more likely to accept a higher price than you would have if it was easily accessible.
- imglorp 8y ago
  Not a marketing person, but there also has to be value in the lowest possible bar to begin participating, and then a higher one later to increase engagement with public price menus. "Call now for sales pitch" is not that: it means secret deals and whatever they can haggle out of you. Look, even this dinosaur got it right: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/api-management/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/api-manage...
  - jnaddef 8y ago
    You are absolutely right, there is actually a whole panel of different techniques that aim at getting you accept offers you would not accept straight on. I believe as a consumer it is important to be aware of those different manipulation techniques so you can step back and take a rational decision. For example in case of call for sale, it should trigger an alarm telling you to walk away. If you have a high interest in the product and want to call anyway, make sure to know what price you are willing to pay BEFORE calling and do not commit to anything during the call.
  - WJW 8y ago
    TBH though: - You are WAY underestimating modern Microsoft, they may be a dinosaur in that they are a relatively old company but they are definitely still one of the bigger predators around. - Not every business has the same target audience. Some companies desire "everyone" and will make the barrier as low as possible; some companies will purposely target only those customers with the money and commitment to call a sales team and will not make the effort to support customers who are not worth the attention.
mxfh 8y ago
"The Mercator projection is often held to be an imperialist distortion of the globe, and that's what traditional latitudes and longitudes use." There is a difference between a projected coordinate system (like Mercator) and geographic coordinate systems. In Mercator you use projected Mercator-Meters not Latitude and Longitude. All you need to know for local R² (2D Euclidean) estimates, is that longitudes scale with cos(latitude), that's it. How does your system handle 89°N 0°W, and 89°N, 180°W ? Does it infer 222km or 346km? If it's the latter, it's not spherical as in S². There is quite a body of research into equal-area hierarchical partitions of Sphere. Adressing there is mostly neither trivial nor intuitive and also not compatible with most raster data formats when it comes to storage. Discrete Global Grid System (DGGS, Pyxis), HealPIX, H3 as variant of DGGRID, EQ_REGIONS, just to name those I remember. So I'm watching ;)
ghayes 8y ago
I thought this was a wink and a nod to just using standard latitude/longitude. Doesn't lat/long naturally solve each of your bullet points? •Length-optimized. More digits = more precision, check. •Precision optimized. Except for adding zeros, check. •Precision-focused. Sig figs cover this. •Logic-optimized. Adding or subtracting to lat or long respectively. •Spheroid-optimized. I believe this applies to latitude and longitude, as well, since there's less surface area for a given coordinate space. Though, maybe it's the reverse, that it's more precise at the poles.
- ehsankia 8y ago
  They do speak of characters, which then starts to just sound like https://plus.codes https://plus.codes
duhi88 8y ago
Sounds cool, but W3W solves a few different problems. It's got to sound natural, be easy to recognize by various voice systems, and easy to communicate between people. "12 character code" might solve the problem from your perspective, but the point is that barcodes and IDs are annoying to read and copy by hand.
thelittlenag 8y ago
You should check out what we're working on at qalocate.bamsaas.com/whitepapers/. Even an improvement on W3W is still going to be rather limited and only address part of the problem. We're trying to provide solutions for the entire space.
ascar 8y ago
Your first four points basically describe lat/lon. But it is hard for humans to parse long characters/numbers. And it's even more difficult to speak random characters. E.g. "B" "b" "be" "bee" are all spoken the same. That's why we use something like the NATO Phonetic Alphabet.
sneak 8y ago
> "I'm preparing my own version, truly open source (though with a premium component), with the following improvements over W3W:" See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_geocoding_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_geocoding_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Grid_Reference_System#See_also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Grid_Reference_System... The thing you are trying to design has probably already been designed.

estomagordo 8y ago

So your solution won't result in "coordinates" easily memorized by humans or easily translated to the very vast majority of map implementations?

mchannon 8y ago
Not sure how you got that from what I typed. The fact is the 4 coordinates (two numeric, two with the stupid "N/S/E/W" corresponding with traditional), decimal points, and reverse order from an X,Y coordinate system, are hardly easy to memorize. They're next to impossible to memorize. What part of pencil and paper didn't come across?
- StavrosK 8y ago
  Because, from what you've described, it sounds like your system will look like base64-encoded coordinates. Ie 39.022874, 21.913384 will be IJASDO, which isn't as easy to memorize as W3W.
  - mchannon 8y ago
    Not base64, but similar. I think "IJASDO" would be way easier to memorize than person.guards.gangs (I will definitely give W3W credit for picking unintentioned yet humorous word combos), particularly if English wasn't my first language. If you disagree with this logic, explain to me why automobiles' license plates should use W3W-style. ("idiot-driver-honk"). Wait, was that first one persons.guards.gangs? persons.guard.gangs? You'd think if you were one off in the dictionary it would still get you where you needed to go, but no. W3W is a clever product. Mine is also clever, and this industry will never have one-size-fits-all, and that's ok. W3W has a not-so-clever marketing approach. I doubt plus.codes would have ever seen the light of day if W3W had a more FAANG-style approach to marketing.
    - solidasparagus 8y ago
      > I think "IJASDO" would be way easier to memorize than person.guards.gangs Completely disagree. No way 6 arbitrary letters is easier to remember than 3 arbitrary words.
    - jjeaff 8y ago
      Random letters are objectively much harder to memorize. 6 letters is essentially 6 words with one syllable each. W3w approach is only 3 syllables and much quicker to say. You would also have less issues where a pause is required. Like JA vs J ... A to keep this letters from sounding like one.
- mvexel 8y ago
  Perhaps an example would have helped. With numeric coordinates relative orientation is fairly intuitive. It's simple arithmetic. How does your proposed system replicate that?

pojzon 8y ago

Would you mind to share a github or its still private wip ?

mchannon 8y ago
github.com/mchannon/hashsite

afiori 8y ago

> My system has a simple and clever way to equally represent the dense equatorial regions and the sparse arctic and antarctic regions, and that equals shorter codes. > With pencil and paper, you'll be able to figure out how to go N, E, S, W by X distance by adjusting a particular character. Topologically speaking, I am intrigued :)

EGreg 8y ago

Contact me: greg at the domain qbix.com We are currently using geohash and curious why it’s worse than this.

mchannon 8y ago
Geohash is easily the best system currently out there. Worse might be a little harsh, but my system: •Packs slightly more bits into the string (naturally there's a tradeoff with data fidelity) for shorter strings •Follows a completely logical alphanumeric distribution (Geohash will skip letters, some for good reason, like o and l, and some for not-so-much, like a) •Some of the other benefits in the original post are also missing. You could probably do this with other systems, but the goal is to allow everyday people to be able to pack a short string in a tweet and have everybody else know exactly where they mean.
- alasdair_ 8y ago
  >You could probably do this with other systems, but the goal is to allow everyday people to be able to pack a short string in a tweet and have everybody else know exactly where they mean. 89c25855b9b That's the S2 string for a section of Times Square, NY. Usefully "89c25855b" is a well-defined, less precise location comprising a larger area. You can go up or down in levels of precision easily and everything can be stored as a single 64-bit integer with lots of extremely useful properties, (e.g. the use of the Hillbert Curve with all of it's benefits, like localization in address space and real space - see http://blog.christianperone.com/2015/08/googles-s2-geometry-on-the-sphere-cells-and-hilbert-curve/ http://blog.christianperone.com/2015/08/googles-s2-geometry-...) If your system adds more benefits than this, I'd love to hear more about it!
eruci 8y ago
Geohash does not provide a one-to-one mapping. Geohashes "u150gxv4" and "u150gxv5" and others, decode to (50.8,4.38). Also, geohashes of many proximal points are very different (see http://geohash.org/f840p2n2p3 http://geohash.org/f840p2n2p3 and http://geohash.org/dxfpzryrzq http://geohash.org/dxfpzryrzq although these locations are 1 meter apart) Also, while geohashes are great for computer storage, they are not so much for human memory.

darkstar999 8y ago

Does it account for geological drifting? This is probably the most important social issue with these kind of systems.

mchannon 8y ago
Not OOTB, but I would imagine that any geocoding system could include a suffix, like "(1987)", to know which dataset to use, so as long as there was a server providing accurate geocoding for a particular point in time. This is a service-related question, though, not a method-related question. There's no math equation that'll tell you your house is there when it used to be here.
- yorwba 8y ago
  The formula might not be elegant, but if you have an exact description of tectonic drift, you can absolutely have a code that refers to a fixed location on its plate, rather than to a point on some imaginary sphere. GPS coordinates are just one possible solution, there's no reason to consider equivalent encodings of the same values as the only alternatives.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > The formula might not be elegant, but if you have an exact description of tectonic drift, you can absolutely have a code that refers to a fixed location on its plate, rather than to a point on some imaginary sphere. Sure, but (1) is there a good way to get an exact description of tectonic drift?, And (2) does tectonic drift account for all shifts of surface features (intuitively, it would not necessarily for features not fixed to bedrock, which accounts for a very large share of interesting-to-humans features)?
    - yorwba 8y ago
      (1) By measuring the location of a few designated landmarks, it should be possible to extrapolate tectonic-level shifts to all other points on the same plate pretty accurately. (2) Changes on a smaller scale, e.g. due to a landslide, are probably less surprising when they cause a change in location codes. On the other hand, there might be some houses on a hill somewhere slowly sliding down, where the system doesn't work. (I also realized that my previous comment can be read as supporting a flat earth theory, especially the part about the sphere being imaginary. I firmly believe that the earth is a bumpy ellipsoid, though.)

alasdair_ 8y ago

> Half the "namespace" of nearly every coordinate system is biased toward the poles. The distance between 89° N, 10°W, and 89°N, 10°E is 38km, but at 1°N, it's 2226km. My system has a simple and clever way to equally represent the dense equatorial regions and the sparse arctic and antarctic regions, and that equals shorter codes. The "S2" geometry system (http://s2geometry.io/ http://s2geometry.io/) is what Google Maps and many other large systems use. It has a small bias towards the poles in terms of some S2 cells being slightly larger than others at the extremes but the bias is pretty minimal. Another system, Uber's H3 (https://eng.uber.com/h3/ https://eng.uber.com/h3/), handles this problem in an even better way, although it loses some of the benefits of S2, such as having fine-grained cells no longer exactly fitting into their parent cells. It has other benefits however. One thing missing from all of these system, including W3W, is that none of them have a height component. If I go to a party in a strange condo and need to call for an ambulance, there is a huge difference between being on the first floor and the fiftieth floor of the same building and W3W does nothing to solve this problem.

mchannon 8y ago
The "Z" dimension is something I've been planning on having as part of the system as well. Since people appreciate height from street level differently than raw altitude, both will be accommodated in my system.
- eruci 8y ago
  Interesting idea. How do you plan to implement Z and up to what height/depth?

donatj 8y ago

You have to call Google for Analytics pricing when you outgrow the free tier. And no, we could not afford it.

krisroadruck 8y ago
But at least they tell you that it starts at $150K/year so you know right off the bat if it's even in your ballpark. A lot of SaaS products completely hide thier pricing entirely. I have zero interest in sitting through some sales-bro's phone pitch before I know if I'm even in the right pricing bracket. Nothing like sitting through an hour long preso only to find out afterwards something is 10x what you were looking to spend.
- donatj 8y ago
  Do they now? They certainly didn't at the time a few years ago. I at the time found some prices online searching around but nothing from them. We were very hopeful we'd get some sort of discount because we're in educational tech, so our income per user is very low, but nope. Free to $100k overnight is insane. We’ve got a guy whose full time job now is basically developing analytics tools for us and it’s a cheaper solution.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - jedberg 8y ago
    Back in the day you you didn't have to pay if you ran a Google Ads campaign. There was no minimum spend. If you ran a monthly AdWords campaign for $1/mo you got free GA no matter what your traffic level was. The main catch is that GA goes to "sampling mode" once your traffic gets high enough, and I think you have to pay extra to get full datasets.

delecti 8y ago

To be fair, W3W is already "spheroid-optimized", in that the named squares are quite close to 10'x10' both at the equator and poles. There are grid "skips" (see one here [1]) every so often to keep all of the squares close to the same size. [1] https://gis.stackexchange.com/a/195696 https://gis.stackexchange.com/a/195696 Also don't discount the benefit of their distribution of the words. If you're using voice input and trying to get somewhere, the system can guess which of multiple inputs you mean. If you're in Louisville Kentucky you're more likely to be trying to get to "captain.water.water" (a ~90 minute drive from downtown) than "captains.water.water" (located on an island in the North Atlantic). Do you have a mechanism (maybe a check digit?) to help with that?

mirimir 8y ago
WTF? "captain.water.water" => ~90 minutes from Louisville, Kentucky "captains.water.water" => island in the North Atlantic That's crazy. I mean, "..water" should be a contiguous area. With "*.water.water" a contiguous part of it.
- delecti 8y ago
  Why? You would lose the ability to disambiguate in the way I described. The words aren't coordinates, they're the result of a hash function.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  The non-proximity of W3W locations with similar identifiers is intentional; it's meant as an easy way to perform error checking. The concept is that you state your location, and if you state it wrong, or the other person gets it wrong, the mistake will be obvious because the small change to the identifier results in a location extremely distant from you. The system pretty explicitly considers all squares equal, without a hierarchy such as you envision. There are no identifiers for larger agglomerations of individual squares. (And more specifically, where identifiers are hierarchical, you generally have the larger scope first, not last. URLs are a bizarre exception.)
  - 8y ago

dexterdog 8y ago

Of course it has "call for price." Look at their team page. There are over 100 people listed. That is absolutely insane for a product of this simplicity. The VCs are clearly making them burn through cash as fast as possible so they can own everything.

carbine 8y ago

this is way off topic but try buying Google Marketing Cloud services. you have to fill out a 'talk to sales' form, no one ever calls you back, and if you call/chat with any other type of support they have zero idea who to connect you to. Google is not exempt from this type of behavior, unfortunately.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

scott_s 8y ago

What benefit do you have over Plus Codes (https://plus.codes/ https://plus.codes/)? I only learned about them from this thread, but they seem to solve the problem quite well, and there's no premium component.

mchannon 8y ago
Plus Codes have little application outside building addressing. If I tell you I'm at 4CFM+JW, come get me, you're going to be pretty helpless, because I didn't include the city. Want to shift a little to the east? 4CFM+JX works, but 4CFM+JY? Whoops. How about north or south? Maybe there's a way to do that, but I haven't found it yet. How about upping the precision? The size of the square is maybe 4X the W3W grid cell, but not aware of a way for plus codes to achieve a smaller cell. I'm not out here to bash everybody else's solutions. They're all pretty good, particularly when you limit them to particular applications. Mine just happens to be a slightly improved approach, and slightly less full of drawbacks than everybody else's.
- Scaevolus 8y ago
  8GC2CMXR+X63 is a global plus code with 3x3m precision.
- Quanttek 8y ago
  I'm no expert but regarding your question on precision: afaik the longer the plus code is, the more precise it gets
- Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
  > Mine just happens to be a slightly improved approach, and slightly less full of drawbacks than everybody else's. Honest opinion: it is not. Plus codes is the one that has least drawbacks and most advantages.
  - mchannon 8y ago
    I have a real problem with people giving dishonest opinions, so good on you. But seriously, you haven't seen it yet. Ever read Green Eggs and Ham?

jnaddef 8y ago

It is actually a form of "foot in the door" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot-in-the-door_technique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot-in-the-door_technique. If you see a high pricing on their webpage you might go away immediately. But if you make the effort to calling them, you are already committing yourself and you are more likely to accept a higher price than you would have if it was easily accessible.

imglorp 8y ago
Not a marketing person, but there also has to be value in the lowest possible bar to begin participating, and then a higher one later to increase engagement with public price menus. "Call now for sales pitch" is not that: it means secret deals and whatever they can haggle out of you. Look, even this dinosaur got it right: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/api-management/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/api-manage...
- jnaddef 8y ago
  You are absolutely right, there is actually a whole panel of different techniques that aim at getting you accept offers you would not accept straight on. I believe as a consumer it is important to be aware of those different manipulation techniques so you can step back and take a rational decision. For example in case of call for sale, it should trigger an alarm telling you to walk away. If you have a high interest in the product and want to call anyway, make sure to know what price you are willing to pay BEFORE calling and do not commit to anything during the call.
- WJW 8y ago
  TBH though: - You are WAY underestimating modern Microsoft, they may be a dinosaur in that they are a relatively old company but they are definitely still one of the bigger predators around. - Not every business has the same target audience. Some companies desire "everyone" and will make the barrier as low as possible; some companies will purposely target only those customers with the money and commitment to call a sales team and will not make the effort to support customers who are not worth the attention.

mxfh 8y ago

"The Mercator projection is often held to be an imperialist distortion of the globe, and that's what traditional latitudes and longitudes use." There is a difference between a projected coordinate system (like Mercator) and geographic coordinate systems. In Mercator you use projected Mercator-Meters not Latitude and Longitude. All you need to know for local R² (2D Euclidean) estimates, is that longitudes scale with cos(latitude), that's it. How does your system handle 89°N 0°W, and 89°N, 180°W ? Does it infer 222km or 346km? If it's the latter, it's not spherical as in S². There is quite a body of research into equal-area hierarchical partitions of Sphere. Adressing there is mostly neither trivial nor intuitive and also not compatible with most raster data formats when it comes to storage. Discrete Global Grid System (DGGS, Pyxis), HealPIX, H3 as variant of DGGRID, EQ_REGIONS, just to name those I remember. So I'm watching ;)

ghayes 8y ago

I thought this was a wink and a nod to just using standard latitude/longitude. Doesn't lat/long naturally solve each of your bullet points? •Length-optimized. More digits = more precision, check. •Precision optimized. Except for adding zeros, check. •Precision-focused. Sig figs cover this. •Logic-optimized. Adding or subtracting to lat or long respectively. •Spheroid-optimized. I believe this applies to latitude and longitude, as well, since there's less surface area for a given coordinate space. Though, maybe it's the reverse, that it's more precise at the poles.

ehsankia 8y ago
They do speak of characters, which then starts to just sound like https://plus.codes https://plus.codes

duhi88 8y ago

Sounds cool, but W3W solves a few different problems. It's got to sound natural, be easy to recognize by various voice systems, and easy to communicate between people. "12 character code" might solve the problem from your perspective, but the point is that barcodes and IDs are annoying to read and copy by hand.

thelittlenag 8y ago

You should check out what we're working on at qalocate.bamsaas.com/whitepapers/. Even an improvement on W3W is still going to be rather limited and only address part of the problem. We're trying to provide solutions for the entire space.

ascar 8y ago

Your first four points basically describe lat/lon. But it is hard for humans to parse long characters/numbers. And it's even more difficult to speak random characters. E.g. "B" "b" "be" "bee" are all spoken the same. That's why we use something like the NATO Phonetic Alphabet.

sneak 8y ago

> "I'm preparing my own version, truly open source (though with a premium component), with the following improvements over W3W:" See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_geocoding_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_geocoding_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Grid_Reference_System#See_also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Grid_Reference_System... The thing you are trying to design has probably already been designed.