31 ms·

OkHi – Solving the lack of a physical address system in Kenya

31 points by kipdotcom 12y ago

ColinWright 12y ago
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. Added in edit: 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: No physical Address? No problem! We make it easy to get together even when you can't give an address. And I am 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, nothing 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. 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. 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, much more disposable income.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  http://www.okhi.co/insight http://www.okhi.co/insight Has some more hints but even after reading that it's mostly unclear. At a guess they couple an ID to a lat/lon pair, a 'just for you' google map pin.
- jhull 12y ago
  Exactly. They list "Create" "Share" and "Relax" but there is no "Why"
  - BronSteeDiam 12y ago
    If you live in a country with no addresses, you don't need to be told "Why". From their blog "So what’s wrong with the physical address system in Kenya? It’s not that it doesn’t work, it’s that it fundamentally doesn’t exist. The majority of homes do not have a name or number, rarely have a street name and definitely no national level post or zip code. This leads to major social and economic issues that are throttling growth in Kenya. Imagine an ambulance driver who can’t find their casualty, a pizza delivery man who can’t find his customer or a bank that does not know where their customers live. This happens thousands of times a day in Kenya and almost every other emerging market in the world. It’s a big problem that has to be fixed and we believe we’re the ones to do that."
    - doxcf434 12y ago
      The screen shots of the app on Google Play do show streets and names on a map though.
    - jhull 12y ago
      My point is, why do I need to dig to the bottom post of their blog in order to find out what they do. That should be clear on the homepage.
      - patcon 12y ago
        I think their point was that it might not be a matter of how easy it would be to help you understand, but that not every website is trying to communicate with a Western man or woman. On the flip, can you imagine how inadequate most landing page messaging is for someone from Botswana or even Nicaragua :)
        ColinWright 12y ago
        Imagine you could use their solution, that you have the problem that they're solving, but you don't know that they have the solution. Now imagine that you end up on their landing page. Have a look. What is there that tells you that: a) they understand your problem, and b) they have a neat, clean, efficient and effective solution. Nothing. They need to make it clear that they have a solution to a problem that you might not at this moment remember that you need solving. I understand that you think I'm not in their target market. In fact I am, but that's not the point. The point is that a landing page should bring to mind why they need you, and make sure you know that they are a brilliant solution.
      - tibbon 12y ago
        But if you were the target market, you'd understand it. Victoria's Secret doesn't explain the purpose of bras on their front page- yet their target market understands the purpose of them.
        ColinWright 12y ago
- nmcfarl 12y ago
  The Google Play store link seems to be the most useful for figuring out what it does: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.okhi.app https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.okhi.app
- zrail 12y ago
  You are not the target market. The target market would know exactly what this is and why it's useful, because they live every day without a physical addressing system like most of the world enjoys[1] [1]: http://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g294206-i9216-k5547694-Physical_Street_Addresses_in_Kenya-Kenya.html http://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g294206-i9216-k5547694-...
curiouslurker 12y ago
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!
brianbreslin 12y ago
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"
- jacquesm 12y ago
  I had the opposite problem while living in Toronto. I'm so used to navigate by landmarks that I couldn't find places I'd been to before because everything looked just about identical. Second street down from the 'pizza-pizza' on the west side of Yonge street. Right. I had not quite figured there would be multiple pizza-pizza franchises on Yonge street alone.
- ithkuil 12y ago
  Rural Ireland has the same problem. Streets usually do have a name, but often they have more than one name and it's not clear which segment has a name and which another. Houses don't have numbers but names, and it's often not written on the house. Postcodes are only available for Dublin. And it's funny how people don't see it as a problem, even after you spell it out.
  - doxcf434 12y ago
    Japan doesn't have street names (normally), they number the blocks and houses. Which is a bit confusing, since the numbers of the houses are not necessarily in order either, other than generally assigned clockwise as they're built. So finding an address with out a map or asking someone can be tricky.
    - brianbreslin 12y ago
      There is an excellent TED talk by Derek Sivers on this issue and he uses Tokyo as an example, as it confused the early google maps engineers. http://sivers.org/jaddr http://sivers.org/jaddr
      - doxcf434 12y ago
timwiththebo 12y ago
Thanks for all for the feedback, we clearly need to work on our website messaging! 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! To try to help explain in a little more detail what we're up to... * Problem * 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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIaBTJxdddY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIaBTJxdddY 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. 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. This is happening 1000s of times a day all over Kenya and other emerging markets around the world. * Solution * The short/honest answer is that we don't know yet. The longer answer is our vision. 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. 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. 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 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. We're super keen to get everyone's input and ideas so comment away or ping me directly at timbo@okhi.co.
- ColinWright 12y ago
  OK, here are my immediate thoughts about solving the problem. It comes in two parts - setting up, and finding. Setting up ... * Take a photo of your front door (or where ever it is you're meeting), * Include your lat/long, * Create a unique, private ID (or URL of some sort), * Share it. Finding ... * Point the app at the URL * The app guides you to the lat/long * The app displays how close you are, and the photo. Is that what you do? If it's slick and usable then it could be really good. If it's something else that you do then it would be fascinating to see a compare-and-contrast.
deftnerd 12y ago
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". 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.
- timwiththebo 12y ago
  Yep, Chris and the team at W3W are also trying to solve a similar problem. We're big fans of what they're doing and regularly share with each other thoughts & learnings about how to solve this lack of address system problem. Check out their mobile app, it's really nice.
- euskode 12y ago
  Is W3W dead? All this past tense has me curious now. Surely a unique approach.
kmarima 12y ago
sounds very similar to http://mydoor.co/ http://mydoor.co/
- eertami 12y ago
  Maybe it's just me and I'm missing the point entirely, but what is the difference between linking to a "door handle" or just a map. You can include some text? I just don't see what the problem they are trying to solve is.
euskode 12y ago
We spent 2 years trying to solve this very problem at Addy. 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. We decided to switch gears months ago. 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. I am excited to see how things go for OkHi. Ultimately, though, I think this problem is best solved by someone like Facebook. Why they haven't done so yet is beyond me.
- seansmith1020 12y ago
  I think the difference is your market though. Was Addy US focused? In Kenya, desperately describing the color of the tree in front of your gate to an Ambulance driver as a loved one lays dying is a very realistic situation. With poorly signed streets and no number system to speak of it seems to me there is plenty of incentive.
  - euskode 12y ago
    Absolutely not, we were very much Middle East and Africa focused, in fact we've lived in many of the countries where we were going to market. We were in SF physically, but had on-the-ground teams in 15 cities.
    - seansmith1020 12y ago
      Perhaps you all just mistimed the market. With smart phone penetration and 3G coverage steadily increasing, maybe two years ago there just wasn't the existing user base to make it feasible. If that were the case you'd also have to incentivize the purchase of smart phones and data plans (which is always a difficult sell). However, the need is glaring and I refuse to believe there is no incentive for people to find a better solution. Happy to listen to a counter argument though.
AdamN 12y ago
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). This simply isn't possible without low-level addressing. I hope OkHi can get this solved.
- tr33house 12y ago
  I am actually working on this. It's going to be an awesome solution... wait and see :D
awad 12y ago
I think they're competing with https://addy.co https://addy.co 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.
fiatjaf 12y ago
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. But, this really should be a P2P network with a petname system or something like that.
pjc50 12y ago
Ireland also has this problem: http://www.myloc8ion.com/news/rabbitte-reversed-decision-to-proceed-with-national-postcode http://www.myloc8ion.com/news/rabbitte-reversed-decision-to-... 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. I can't possibly see it working without government adoption; it's really something that needs to be part of the public service infrastructure.
- euskode 12y ago
  GO Code from Alex Pigot is probably the best known one: http://www.gocode.ie/ http://www.gocode.ie/

31 points by kipdotcom 12y ago

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. Added in edit: 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: No physical Address? No problem! We make it easy to get together even when you can't give an address. And I am 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, nothing 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. 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. 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, much more disposable income.

jacquesm 12y ago
http://www.okhi.co/insight http://www.okhi.co/insight Has some more hints but even after reading that it's mostly unclear. At a guess they couple an ID to a lat/lon pair, a 'just for you' google map pin.
jhull 12y ago
Exactly. They list "Create" "Share" and "Relax" but there is no "Why"
- BronSteeDiam 12y ago
  If you live in a country with no addresses, you don't need to be told "Why". From their blog "So what’s wrong with the physical address system in Kenya? It’s not that it doesn’t work, it’s that it fundamentally doesn’t exist. The majority of homes do not have a name or number, rarely have a street name and definitely no national level post or zip code. This leads to major social and economic issues that are throttling growth in Kenya. Imagine an ambulance driver who can’t find their casualty, a pizza delivery man who can’t find his customer or a bank that does not know where their customers live. This happens thousands of times a day in Kenya and almost every other emerging market in the world. It’s a big problem that has to be fixed and we believe we’re the ones to do that."
  - doxcf434 12y ago
    The screen shots of the app on Google Play do show streets and names on a map though.
  - jhull 12y ago
    My point is, why do I need to dig to the bottom post of their blog in order to find out what they do. That should be clear on the homepage.
    - patcon 12y ago
      I think their point was that it might not be a matter of how easy it would be to help you understand, but that not every website is trying to communicate with a Western man or woman. On the flip, can you imagine how inadequate most landing page messaging is for someone from Botswana or even Nicaragua :)
      - ColinWright 12y ago
        Imagine you could use their solution, that you have the problem that they're solving, but you don't know that they have the solution. Now imagine that you end up on their landing page. Have a look. What is there that tells you that: a) they understand your problem, and b) they have a neat, clean, efficient and effective solution. Nothing. They need to make it clear that they have a solution to a problem that you might not at this moment remember that you need solving. I understand that you think I'm not in their target market. In fact I am, but that's not the point. The point is that a landing page should bring to mind why they need you, and make sure you know that they are a brilliant solution.
    - tibbon 12y ago
      But if you were the target market, you'd understand it. Victoria's Secret doesn't explain the purpose of bras on their front page- yet their target market understands the purpose of them.
      - ColinWright 12y ago
nmcfarl 12y ago
The Google Play store link seems to be the most useful for figuring out what it does: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.okhi.app https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.okhi.app
zrail 12y ago
You are not the target market. The target market would know exactly what this is and why it's useful, because they live every day without a physical addressing system like most of the world enjoys[1] [1]: http://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g294206-i9216-k5547694-Physical_Street_Addresses_in_Kenya-Kenya.html http://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g294206-i9216-k5547694-...

curiouslurker 12y ago

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!

brianbreslin 12y ago

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"

jacquesm 12y ago
I had the opposite problem while living in Toronto. I'm so used to navigate by landmarks that I couldn't find places I'd been to before because everything looked just about identical. Second street down from the 'pizza-pizza' on the west side of Yonge street. Right. I had not quite figured there would be multiple pizza-pizza franchises on Yonge street alone.
ithkuil 12y ago
Rural Ireland has the same problem. Streets usually do have a name, but often they have more than one name and it's not clear which segment has a name and which another. Houses don't have numbers but names, and it's often not written on the house. Postcodes are only available for Dublin. And it's funny how people don't see it as a problem, even after you spell it out.
- doxcf434 12y ago
  Japan doesn't have street names (normally), they number the blocks and houses. Which is a bit confusing, since the numbers of the houses are not necessarily in order either, other than generally assigned clockwise as they're built. So finding an address with out a map or asking someone can be tricky.
  - brianbreslin 12y ago
    There is an excellent TED talk by Derek Sivers on this issue and he uses Tokyo as an example, as it confused the early google maps engineers. http://sivers.org/jaddr http://sivers.org/jaddr
    - doxcf434 12y ago

timwiththebo 12y ago

Thanks for all for the feedback, we clearly need to work on our website messaging! 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! To try to help explain in a little more detail what we're up to... * Problem * 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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIaBTJxdddY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIaBTJxdddY 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. 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. This is happening 1000s of times a day all over Kenya and other emerging markets around the world. * Solution * The short/honest answer is that we don't know yet. The longer answer is our vision. 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. 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. 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 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. We're super keen to get everyone's input and ideas so comment away or ping me directly at timbo@okhi.co.

ColinWright 12y ago
OK, here are my immediate thoughts about solving the problem. It comes in two parts - setting up, and finding. Setting up ... * Take a photo of your front door (or where ever it is you're meeting), * Include your lat/long, * Create a unique, private ID (or URL of some sort), * Share it. Finding ... * Point the app at the URL * The app guides you to the lat/long * The app displays how close you are, and the photo. Is that what you do? If it's slick and usable then it could be really good. If it's something else that you do then it would be fascinating to see a compare-and-contrast.

deftnerd 12y ago

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". 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.

timwiththebo 12y ago
Yep, Chris and the team at W3W are also trying to solve a similar problem. We're big fans of what they're doing and regularly share with each other thoughts & learnings about how to solve this lack of address system problem. Check out their mobile app, it's really nice.
euskode 12y ago
Is W3W dead? All this past tense has me curious now. Surely a unique approach.

kmarima 12y ago

sounds very similar to http://mydoor.co/ http://mydoor.co/

eertami 12y ago
Maybe it's just me and I'm missing the point entirely, but what is the difference between linking to a "door handle" or just a map. You can include some text? I just don't see what the problem they are trying to solve is.

euskode 12y ago

We spent 2 years trying to solve this very problem at Addy. 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. We decided to switch gears months ago. 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. I am excited to see how things go for OkHi. Ultimately, though, I think this problem is best solved by someone like Facebook. Why they haven't done so yet is beyond me.

seansmith1020 12y ago
I think the difference is your market though. Was Addy US focused? In Kenya, desperately describing the color of the tree in front of your gate to an Ambulance driver as a loved one lays dying is a very realistic situation. With poorly signed streets and no number system to speak of it seems to me there is plenty of incentive.
- euskode 12y ago
  Absolutely not, we were very much Middle East and Africa focused, in fact we've lived in many of the countries where we were going to market. We were in SF physically, but had on-the-ground teams in 15 cities.
  - seansmith1020 12y ago
    Perhaps you all just mistimed the market. With smart phone penetration and 3G coverage steadily increasing, maybe two years ago there just wasn't the existing user base to make it feasible. If that were the case you'd also have to incentivize the purchase of smart phones and data plans (which is always a difficult sell). However, the need is glaring and I refuse to believe there is no incentive for people to find a better solution. Happy to listen to a counter argument though.

AdamN 12y ago

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). This simply isn't possible without low-level addressing. I hope OkHi can get this solved.

tr33house 12y ago
I am actually working on this. It's going to be an awesome solution... wait and see :D

awad 12y ago

I think they're competing with https://addy.co https://addy.co 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.

fiatjaf 12y ago

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. But, this really should be a P2P network with a petname system or something like that.

pjc50 12y ago

Ireland also has this problem: http://www.myloc8ion.com/news/rabbitte-reversed-decision-to-proceed-with-national-postcode http://www.myloc8ion.com/news/rabbitte-reversed-decision-to-... 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. I can't possibly see it working without government adoption; it's really something that needs to be part of the public service infrastructure.

euskode 12y ago
GO Code from Alex Pigot is probably the best known one: http://www.gocode.ie/ http://www.gocode.ie/