BENGALURU: As ecommerce and last-mile delivery
services are making their way into the daily lives of urban India, the holes of
the country's largely incomplete address system are starting to show. Any end
customer can relate to the lamentable experience of trying to communicate
directions to a government employee or a delivery boy armed with jewellery, a
letter from a loved one, or the day's lunch.
Seeing this, startups such as Zippr and wWhere
have come up to "revolutionise" the location data industry,
overwriting obsolete addressing systems with specific short codes that, if all
goes according to plan, are to be shared with governments and delivery
providers alike to facilitate hassle-free and efficient services.
Zippr lets users create random four-digit,
four-number codes that identify any dwelling, slums included. "We want to
produce a standardised form of address, and then integrate services from both
the private sector as well as the government to provide services for citizens,"
said Parikshith Reddy, marketing and partnerships director. The company, which
has raised Rs 6 crore from the Indian Angel Network, has already run pilots
with governments in Hyderabad and Vijayawada to roll out its coding system, and
is in talks with governments in Delhi and Mumbai.
Another
startup, wWhere, allows users to share locations real-time, using GPS
technology that is accurate down to a five-meter radius. "We wanted to
eliminate postal addresses altogether using the mobile," said founder and
CEO Ritam Bhatnagar, who raised angel funding in March.
Such
solutions are not new to India. MapmyIndia, founded in 1992, had already been
assigning short codes to physical addresses for years, according to the company
backed by Nexus Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield &
Byers.
"It's like a vanity code that people can
easily remember, which has its value, because you can't remember my GPS
coordinates. But the fundamental problem of geocoding is still there,"
said Karthee Madasamy, vice president and managing director of Qualcomm Ventures,
which has backed MapmyIndia.
"The pain point of users remain finding
their way to the actual address in a fast and safe manner, which is only
achieved by superior maps with house number data," said Rakesh Verma,
managing director of MapmyIndia. "One of the major bottlenecks in the
implementation would be the herculean task of mapping these codes to all
existing physical addresses. The other would be to see how much traction can be
found from industry and consumers alike."
For the
time being, third-party logistics players are experimenting with their own
initiatives to address the geocoding issue, which has devised technology to be
able to identify localities solely based on pin codes to improve routing.
"There is no specific use case (of these codes) for us unless these codes
start getting adopted by ecommerce companies and get passed on to us,"
said CTO Kapil Bharati.
Economic Times