in the surrounding area, more than 400,000 others inhabit mud huts, one-room cinder block bungalows, or ramshackle brick structures at citrus plantations and informal farms along roads that wind through the bush. Nikki Stuart-Thompson serves these people with a nonprofit that provides health care to the poor.

But before she can help them, she needs to find them, which isn’t always easy. There are villages with thousands of residents but no street addresses and places with houses strung out every few hundred yards on dirt paths.

So last year, when Stuart-Thompson heard about a system that could help her workers navigate directly to any location in the region with a margin of error of only a few feet, she quickly embraced the idea. It didn’t matter that the addresses were nonsensical three-word phrases such as lakefront.boundless.vitals (that’s her office), orchestra.grapeseed.sergeants (a local clinic), or file.trod.explicable (the hospital).

Source: Bloomberg Technology

Date: August 28th, 2018

Link: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-08-28/mapping-startup-aims-to-disrupt-addresses-using-three-word-system

Discussion

1) How might you use this sort of service for a business idea?

2) Why does it matter a lot that information systems are being used to solve issues for the poorest people on earth?