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

okhi.co

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

#21

Post by drivingmenuts »

timwiththebo wrote: post #11

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…

I would suggest making it really obvious that this a Kenya-only thing (I'm in the US). While it's probably an interesting piece of tech, it has next to no application in the US, which is where Hacker News is based and has it's primary audience.

Second - the landing page tells me nothing about what the app actually does. I saw the tagline on HN, went to the page and was immediately confused with some line about "dinner", which made me wonder if the page had been hacked or worse.

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

#22

Post by drivingmenuts »

ColinWright wrote: post #13
timwiththebo wrote: post #11

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…

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…

Isn't that pretty much GPS with a user-provided street view of the destination?

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

#23

Post by ColinWright »

patcon wrote: post #19
jhull wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 :)

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.

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

#24

Post by ColinWright »

BronSteeDiam wrote: post #10
jhull wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. They list "Create" "Share" and "Relax" but there is no "Why"

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 throttlin…

  > From their blog ...
Exactly. Why is this not on their landing page?

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

#25

Post by pantalaimon »

timwiththebo wrote: post #11

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…

I hope the government is also working on fixing this, so even people without smartphones can find their way around.

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

#26

Post by timwiththebo »

deftnerd wrote: post #16

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…

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.

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

#27

Post by notahacker »

timwiththebo wrote: post #11

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…

I'm surprised nobody in the private sector has tried to fix the lack of street names by inventing them, and then sticking fairly robust sponsored street/district name signs everywhere.

My question is how much of the OKHi functionality can be achieved with dumbphones, assuming that a significant proportion of the Kenyan population sticks with them for the foreseeable future?

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

#28

Post by euskode »

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.

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

#29

Post by AdamN »

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.

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

#30

Post by brianbreslin »

doxcf434 wrote: post #17
ithkuil wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

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