WEBVTT

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According to the UN,

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billions of people still live
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
are trying to change that.

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If you go to an online map
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
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,
homes and businesses

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in this vast, unmapped
and unaddressed spaces.

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In Ghana's capital, Accra,

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there are numbers and letters
scrawled onto the sides of walls,

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where they piloted address systems
but not finished them.

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But these places,
these unaddressed places,

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hold huge economic potential.

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

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I worked in the music
business for 10 years,

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and what you may not know
about the music world

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

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So from the musicians
who have to find the gigs

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to the production companies
who bring the equipment,

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everyone somehow always gets lost.

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We even had to add someone
to our schedules

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who was the person you called
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
unloaded all the equipment

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an hour north of Rome,
not an hour south of Rome,

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and a slightly worse day

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where a keyboard player
called me and said,

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"Chris, don't panic,
but we may have just sound-checked

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at 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
with a friend of mine

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who is a mathematician,

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

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We thought, well,
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,
latitude and longitude,

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were just too complicated.

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So we divided the world
into three-meter squares.

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

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and we found that there are
enough combinations

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of three dictionary words

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that we could name every three-meter
square in the world 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 for
the 57-trillion-odd three-meter squares,

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with a few spare.

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So that's exactly what we did.

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We divided the world
into three-meter squares,

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gave each one a unique,
three-word identifier --

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what we call a three-word address.

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So for example, right here,

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I'm standing at mustards-coupons-pinup,

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(Laughter)

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but over here ...

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I'm standing at pinched-
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
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,
like Xhosa, Zulu and Hindi.

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But this idea can do a lot more

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than just get my musicians
to their gigs on time.

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If the 75 percent of countries
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
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 11,000
three-word address signs

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to their community,

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so the pregnant mothers,
when they go into labor,

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can call the emergency services

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and tell them exactly
where to pick them up from,

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because otherwise, the ambulances
have often taken hours to find them.

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In Mongolia, the National Post Service
have adopted the system

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and are now doing deliveries
to many people's houses

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for the first time.

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The UN are using it
to geotag photos in disaster zones

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so they can deliver aid
to exactly the right place.

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

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

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but they really want to get
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
to that exact spot.

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In Africa, the continent
has leapfrogged phone lines

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to go to mobile phones,

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bypassed traditional banks
to go straight to mobile payments.

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

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Nigeria, Djibouti and Côte d'Ivoire,

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have gone straight to adopting
three-word addresses,

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which means that people in those countries

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have a really simple way
to explain where they live, today.

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For me, poor addressing
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
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)