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New free service to help South Africans find each other

A new South African website launching today has a powerful goal: helping all people to stop getting lost, whether they’re just travelling down the road or into the middle of nowhere.

www.overhere.co.za provides a completely free service that enables people to share and interpret physical addresses in only six to seven characters.

These are all complete addresses with pinpoint accuracy:

4X.7R J77.NV6 DN.GP8N H9CT.V33
Centre of Green Point Lighthouse Sandton City Parking Entrance Masorini Archeological Site Nieu Bethesda Town Centre

Most people will agree that conventional addresses are terrible because:

  • They’re hard to communicate by telephone or even write down accurately (especially in a country with 11 national languages).
  • They’re generally useless outside of urban areas with clear street numbering (i.e. most of the world).
  • Even when you get people to the general area, it’s difficult to identify details like the exact entrance or parking lot to use.
  • They’re hard to fit onto conventional advertising (e.g. business cards, billboards e-mail signatures and press adverts).

The ramifications of the above on South Africa’s economy and social welfare is enormous: whether you’re trying to desperately request emergency services or simply get a pizza delivered, having an accurate address which can be clearly and efficiently communicated is critical.

www.overhere.co.za utilises mapcodes (an open-source international system that has been in the public domain since 2008) to help visitors to the website generate mapcodes or interpret their location (at no cost). Fully integrated into Google Maps, the website also provides driving directions to mapcodes and between mapcodes (with easy-to-copy direct website links).

The website was developed as a December holiday project by a 33 year-old Pretoria resident, Leon Schnell. Leon saw a pressing problem with a solution that was simply suffering from an awareness problem, and sought to address that (pun completely intended). “I first fell in love with the power of ‘short’ addresses when I visited London in 2009 and was exposed to their postcode system … where short postcodes don’t just lead you to a suburb, but to a doorway,” Leon explains. “Why couldn’t we have that in South Africa? Ten years later, why do we still not?”

The most important aspect to understand about mapcodes is this: because they are open source, their underlying technology is freely available to download and can be integrated into any address-based solution. www.overhere.co.za has been created as a showcase for what is possible in a South African context and an encouragement for other businesses and individuals to support this key international innovation.More information: https://www.overhere.co.za/about/

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