anyone got any thoughts on these guys and the opportunity? lots of institutional investment and potential to be involved in many products and services for years. Where does the exit come from though?
https://what3words.com/crowdfunding/
Goes live Monday
I have been eyeing this company since it was founded and will definitely be investing.
I think it’s interesting idea, and I’ve preregistered. but in the interests of playing Devils advocate it does have some criticisms
The point about distances is interesting, as the words are completely random you can’t infer how far apart two points are from their address. You can do that with Longitude and Latitude.
Ditto - interested & pre-registered, but I struggle to see a strong sales case here - how will they make money, how will they become essential to the common person, what exit might they have etc.
Hopefully the pitch deck addresses a lot of these points.
Thank you for posting this! I’d read criticisms of WhatThreeWords before and, whilst they were all similar to this, one of them the argument together quite as well.
I cringe every time I see a UK government/local council service proclaiming that they use it. Why do they want to become slaves to a closed off and paid system like this? It’s going to end up costing them a fortune on the long run - it would probably be cheaper to collaborate on an open source alternative, especiall if they worked with 27 other countries in a tight knit union to make it happen across Europe.
I really couldn’t invest in this because of the arguments in that link - the whole thing rubs me up the wrong way and I’m quite set against it.
Wow - someone at W3W must have really upset Terrence 
I remember seeing this on the news a while back, but as a concept I don’t quite get it - especially as they use a different 3 words in every language, madness in a globalized world 
So to summarise the criticisms:
I’m not a fan of What3Words but I don’t think any of his criticisms are valid.
I do think some of his criticisms are valid, but they don’t necessarily make it a bad investment
pre-registered
I think your summary of criticisms misses the central point which makes this a non-starter.
This company wants to lock the entire world into an addressing scheme they jealously control, and charge people for looking up where they are and where they are going. All queries go through them, they want a monopoly.
Their competition offers free addressing the world over in an open standard which all mapping and gis software has used for decades. For most uses, W3W is less convenient than a link that opens your mapping app.
If companies or countries do decide three words is a good idea for addressing, they can simply come up with their own better scheme (it would not be hard). They have no moat.
Their business model is fundamentally unsound.
I was summarising the criticisms in the article above. It’s just those criticisms which I consider to be invalid.
You argument is much better than that article. I agree with you and it’s effectively the same reason I don’t use W3W myself. A while ago I wanted to implement it in some software I created, but it wasn’t free and I couldn’t store the location database locally so I skipped over it.
I do think their product is based on a good idea and it would be convenient in some situations, e.g. giving an address over the phone and for villages that don’t have street addresses. These situations don’t contrubute revenue though, and I can’t think of any situation which would convince a business to pay to implement W3W other than for the novelty of it.
An interesting blog from a old contributor to this forum
https://www.crowdfeed.net/post/what3words-crowdfunding-round-2020-due-diligence
That’s not entirely accurate - Google Maps are propriety for example. I am unsure if Apple Maps are. I’m not sure I understand the hate for what3words protecting their IP - I haven’t seen it for any other company mentioned so why w3w? (Not trolling, I just genuinely don’t understand the reasoning - I agree they appear to be having a challenge monetising their product etc)
I’m referring to lat/lon, which all mapping software accepts, usually with simple links. That’s an open standard, it’s been around for over 2000 years in a similar form (just looked it up, I had no idea it was from the ancients) and nobody will try to charge you money to use it or force you to go through specific servers to look up a location.
IMO they have no IP - you can’t copyright data. Good luck to them monetising that, but I would not invest.
Given it’s determined geeks that have given us things as wondrous as Linux, I imagine an equally determined group could knock together What4words if the will was there and open source it to the world.
I can’t imagine that happening anytime soon (I’m not aware of any work on a project like that) but I also wouldn’t rule it out and unless What3words manages to create a huge lock-in/network effect for their offering then something like that would end them.
Like @Jim1 I don’t get the anti-proprietary sentiment. The team have worked hard to build it, so is it so wrong of them to charge for it? They don’t charge consumers, only developers/corporates. Also, Google do it already (Charge for geocoding, that is). To me, this argument is like asking Freetrade to put their Invest platform code onto GitHub, or being worried that Freetrade will lose to someone who builds a *non-profit, *open-source commision free broker - which is, to me, extremely unlikely.
I don’t mean to sound stand-offish, sorry if I do, I just really want to see where people are coming from with this.
This. W3W is a non-starter for ‘digital’ location sharing, it’s so easy to just share a link. But W3W is clearly more useful for e.g. postal addresses - that would be a big enough market alone to make a successful company; We can’t put links on envelopes, nor can we remember the 15 digits of a gps coordinate to write down on an envelope. I’ve seen first-hand how our traditional postal address system leads to poor efficiency in logistics. The efficiency of a solution like W3W would be far more efficient and therefore very valuable to couriers, etc.
Very rare to do this outside (or even in) the US, but they appear to have done it; they have patents ( PCT/GB2014/051152). I’m a bit surprised they managed to obtain it, to be honest. To be clear, they’ve patented the software, not data.
Plus codes, developed by Google engineers and released freely, have been around for a few years.
https://plus.codes/
It’s similar to W3W but using a string of letters and numbers instead of three words. W3W avoids similar sounding words, plus codes avoid letters/numbers that can be misread (1 and i are not allowed). The difference is plus codes use a simple, open algorithm to convert lat/lon to a code which anyone can freely implement. They even provide the source code for free.
This is my problem with the criticisms that get levelled at the company. W3W is just a product the same as any other product. They can do what they like with it and charge what they want for it. It seems to me that a lot of people just feel that they are entitled to have any software product for free, and if it’s not free then they get angry.
Now it’s fair to assess the product against the alternatives. There are similar products/standards (i.e. plus codes, lat/lon codes) which are largely similar and free for both consumers and companies so maybe you choose one of those options instead.
It’s not fair to criticise the product just because it isn’t free.
Just to add, what I struggle to understand above all else is the hate in spite of the fact that we do not pay for what3words; it is free (to us). It’s the businesses on the other end using it heavily that pay.
I obviously respect the other side’s opinion, and I do welcome anyone to educate me more on their views - I have a feeling I could just be missing something.