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According to the UN,

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billions of people still live[br]without an address.

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The economist Hernando de Soto said,

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"Without an address,

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you live outside the law.

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You might as well not exist."

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I'm here to tell you how my team and I[br]are trying to change that.

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If you go to an online map[br]and look at a favela in Brazil

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or a township in South Africa,

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you'll see a few streets[br]but a lot of empty space.

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But if you flip to satellite view,

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there are thousands of people,[br]homes and businesses

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in these vast, unmapped,[br]and unaddressed spaces.

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In Ghana's capital, Accra,

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there are numbers and letters[br]scrawled on to the sides of walls,

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where they piloted address systems[br]but not finished them.

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But these places,[br]these unaddressed places,

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hold huge economic potential.

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Here's why the issue[br]of addressing stuck with me.

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I worked in the music[br]business for 10 years,

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and what you may not know[br]about the music world

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is that every day, people struggle[br]with the problems of addressing.

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So from the musicians[br]who have to find the gigs

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to the production companies[br]who bring the equipment,

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everyone somehow always gets lost.

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We even had to add someone[br]to our schedules

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who was the person you called[br]when you thought you'd arrived

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but then realized you hadn't.

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And we had some pretty bad days,

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like in Italy, where a truck driver[br]unloaded all the equipment

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an hour north of Rome,[br]not an hour south of Rome,

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and a slightly worse day where[br]a keyboard player called me and said,

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"Chris, don't panic, but we may[br]have just soundchecked

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to the wrong people's wedding."

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(Laughter)

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So not long after the fated Rome event,

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I chatted this through[br]with a friend of mine

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who is a mathematician,

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and we thought it was a problem[br]we could do something about.

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We thought, well,[br]we could make a new system,

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but it shouldn't look like the old system.

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We agreed that addresses were bad.

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We knew we wanted something very precise,

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but GPS coordinates,[br]latitude and longitude,

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were just too complicated.

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So we divided the world[br]into three-meter squares.

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The world divides into around[br]57 trillion three-meter squares,

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and we found that there are[br]enough combinations

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of three dictionary words

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that we could name every[br]three-meter square in the world

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uniquely

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with just three words.

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We used 40,000 words,

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so that's 40,000 cubed,

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64 trillion combinations of three words,

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which is more than enough[br]for the 57-trillion-odd

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three-meter squares, with a few spare.

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So that's exactly what we did.

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We divided the world[br]into three-meter squares,

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gave each one a unique,[br]three-word identifier,

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what we called a three-word address.

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So for example,

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right here,

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I'm standing at Mustards Coupons Pinup,

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but over here,

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I'm standing at Pinched[br]Singularly Tutorial.

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But we haven't just done this in English.

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We thought it was essential that people[br]should be able to use this system

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in their own language.

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So far, we've built it into 14 languages,

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including French, Swahili, and Arabic,

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and we're working on more now[br]like Xhosa, Zulu, and Hindi.

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But this idea can do a lot more[br]than just my musicians

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to their gigs on time.

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If the 75 percent of countries[br]that struggle with reliable addressing

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started using three-word addresses,

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there's a stack of far more[br]important applications.

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In Durban, South Africa,

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an NGO called Gateway Health

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have distributed to 11,000[br]three-word address signs

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to their community,

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so the pregnant mothers,[br]when they go into labor,

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can call the emergency services

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and tell them exactly[br]where to pick them up from,

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because otherwise the ambulances[br]have often taken hours to find them.

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In Mongolia, the National Post Service[br]have adopted the system,

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and are now doing deliveries[br]to many people's houses

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for the first time.

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The UN is using it

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to geotag photos in disaster zones

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so they can deliver aid[br]to exactly the right place.

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Even Domino's Pizza[br]are using it in the Caribbean,

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because they haven't been able[br]to find customers' homes,

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but they really want to get[br]their pizza to them while its still hot.

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Shortly, you'll be able to get into a car,

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speak the three words,

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and the car will navigate you[br]to that exact spot.

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In Africa, the continent[br]has leapfrogged phone lines

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to go to mobile phones,

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bypassed traditional banks[br]to go straight to mobile payments.

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We're really proud that the post services[br]of three African countries --

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Nigeria, Djibouti, and Côte d'Ivoire,

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have gone straight to adopting[br]three-word addresses,

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which means that people in those countries

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have a really simple way[br]to explain where they live today.

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For me, poor addressing[br]was an annoying frustration,

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but for billions of people,

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it's a huge business inefficiency,

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severely hampers[br]their infrastructure growth,

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and can cost lives.

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We're on a mission to change that,

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three words at a time.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)