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

http://www.okhi.co/

by kipdotcom • 12 years ago

31 45 12 years ago

ColinWright5• 12 years 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.

jacquesm2• 12 years ago

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.

jhull2• 12 years ago

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

BronSteeDiam• 12 years 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."

nmcfarl• 12 years 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

zrail• 12 years 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-...

curiouslurker• 12 years 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!

brianbreslin2• 12 years 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"

jacquesm2• 12 years 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• 12 years 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.

doxcf4343• 12 years 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.

timwiththebo2• 12 years 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

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.

ColinWright5• 12 years 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.

drivingmenuts2• 12 years ago

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

drivingmenuts2• 12 years ago

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.

pantalaimon• 12 years ago

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

notahacker• 12 years ago

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?

BrandonMarc• 12 years ago

I like how Colin broke it down into "setting up" and "finding", the two sides of a use-case scenario.

Since you mentioned delivery riders and ambulances, would you expect (hope) them to be part of your user base? Say a customer / patient is a user ... does the business / hospital need the app, or does the URL you send give them what they need as-is?

Either way, I expect you'll want to (or already have) reach out to businesses, hospitals, police, etc to spur adoption (or at least let them know what it is and how to use it).

Such outfits (on the finding end, with a definite interest in successful use) will also be looking at your website to determine what you do, how it works, how they'll use it, etc.

If you can, create some demonstration videos of how it works. Ideally with actual people in a scenario like you describe. If a 45 second clip can demonstrate what you described above, that could be very helpful in getting people to adopt.

Can you get any insight / partnership / knowledge share from FedEx, UPS, DHL, etc? I'm sure they've operated in Kenya for a long time, and have spent lots of brainpower on figuring out efficient locations and routes.

deftnerd• 12 years 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.

timwiththebo2• 12 years 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.

euskode6• 12 years ago

Is W3W dead? All this past tense has me curious now. Surely a unique approach.

kmarima• 12 years ago

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

eertami• 12 years 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.

euskode6• 12 years 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.

seansmith10203• 12 years 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.

euskode6• 12 years 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.

AdamN• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

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

awad• 12 years ago

I think they're competing with 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• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

Ireland also has this problem: 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.

euskode6• 12 years ago

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

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

Related Stories