A year ago, The Financial Times wrote about What3Words' business woes. But it looks like things are about to get a lot worse.

As reported by a user on Reddit, Mercedes cars no longer support What3words.

I was in touch with What3words customer support and they confirmed me that Mercedes didn’t renewed their What3word license so blocking the service embedded in all their products.

Now, we shouldn't necessarily trust what a random customer service agent says. Nor should we trust a single post on a forum. But if you visit the W3W cars page you'll see a list of the vehicle manufacturers they work with.

Mercedes-Benz is still there - but clicking on the link takes you to a dead page. The links to other manufacturers work.

There's also a popular YouTuber reporting the same problem:

The pull quote from Mercedes themselves is:

The What3Words features was discontinued in December due to low usage by our customers.

OK, so one car company deciding not to use the app isn't the end of the world, right?

Well, as my friend Bloor points out:

This would be the same Mercedes Benz who invested in w3w. […] I’d say that if one of your investors doesn’t want to buy your product, then your product fucking sucks. And/or If your licence fees are so high that even an INVESTOR won’t pay them, your pricing fucking sucks.

He also shows that, apparently, a Director of W3W from Mercedes resigned late last year.

So, is it game over for W3W? Their report from July 2024 identified these risks:

Commercial risk

The success of the business is dependent on the development, conversion and retention of a pipeline of commercial contracts to take the business cash flow positive and profitable.

Behavioural change risk

The Group has created a new addressing format, with the aim of becoming a universal standard for location referencing. A key aspect of this is acquiring and retaining a high volume of newly engaged consumers, creating wide-scale network effects and consumer behaviour change to ultimately deliver commercial contracts.

Even going by the publicly available plans the cost of a W3W lookup is about ⅓rd of a penny. I imagine that Mercedes pay considerably less than that. And yet, an investor who had 4,030,000 Series C1 Preferred Shares, have decided that their customers aren't interested enough in W3W to justify the cost of integrating it into their vehicles.

That's the commercial risk and the behavioural change risk both at once. It appears to me that they can't retain their current corporate customers and don't seem to be able to attract or keep individual consumers.

W3W only succeeds with sufficient network effects. After 12 years of operation, it is yet to reach anything approaching critical mass. Its attempt to insinuate itself within the emergency services (who use it for free) doesn't seem to have transformed into mass adoption. Its premium customers appear to be dropping it. Search and Rescue teams warn against using it.

What's left? The inherent technical flaws in the What3Words algorithm can't be fixed and the intractable commercial flaws in its business model aren't helping. The W3W financial report announced losses of £16 million, against a turnover of £1 million.

How much longer can they go on?

Google do this sometimes. They once proclaimed that Argleton was a real place - despite its non-existence.

While I was looking for something to do in London recently, I came across this curious entry.

Why does Google think there is an "Ancient Metal Vault" in Mayfair?

There's nothing similar on OpenStreetMap. Similarly Bing and Ordnance Survey show nothing there.

I thought it might be a historic place - but there are no search results for it.

What does Google Maps say about the place?

Nothing. Except a UK mobile phone number. When I called, I got an American "This number is not in service" message.

If it were a dozen years ago, I'd've thought this was the start of some augmented reality game. But, instead, I think it's most likely an artefact from some old mapping data they've imported.

Either that, or it is time to go digging up some London streets in the dead of night for an exciting caper!

Result

The colours are wrong, and the labels need adjustment - but not bad for a few lines of code!

Code

library(tidyverse)
library(rnaturalearth)
library(rnaturalearthdata)
library(sf)

centre <- 160 # NZ mostly centred, prevents Africa and South America wrapping.
projection <- "eqearth" # Other good projections are wag1 wag7 eck4 eqearth

crs_string <- paste( "+proj=", projection, " +lon_0=", centre, " +axis=wsu", sep="") # WSU puts South up

target_crs <- st_crs(  crs_string  )

worldrn <- ne_countries( scale = "medium", returnclass = "sf" ) %>%
   st_make_valid()

offset <- 180 - centre

#  Recalculate the polygons
polygon <- st_polygon( x = list(rbind(
                                 c(-0.0001 - offset, 90),
                                 c(0 - offset, 90),
                                 c(0 - offset, -90),
                                 c(-0.0001 - offset, -90),
                                 c(-0.0001 - offset, 90)
))) %>%
   st_sfc() %>%
   st_set_crs(4326)


# modify world dataset to remove overlapping portions with world's polygons
world2 <- worldrn %>% st_difference(polygon)

# Transform
world3 <- world2 %>% st_transform(crs = target_crs)
ggplot(data = world3, aes(group = admin)) +
   #geom_sf( fill = "red" ) +
   geom_sf( fill = world3$mapcolor13, lwd = 0 ) + # remove borders
   geom_sf_label( aes( label = name_long ), label.size = 0, fill = NA, size = 1 ) + 
   theme( panel.grid.major = element_line( color = gray(.5), linetype = "dashed", size = 0.5 ), 
      panel.background = element_rect( fill = "#A7C7E7"))

#  Uncomment to save the map
#ggsave("map.png", width = 32, height = 18, units = "cm")

Further Reading

• https://gis.stackexchange.com/a/287094/129854
• https://r-spatial.org/r/2018/10/25/ggplot2-sf.html
• https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/raster/
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/68278789/how-to-rotate-world-map-using-mollweide-projection-with-sf-rnaturalearth-ggplot

Regular readers may remember that I'm trying to create an "Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality" map. That is, a map with a Gall-Peters Projection and with South up. Oh, and Aoteroa centred. For reasons.

I've got one step closer! I wasn't able to find and decent Peters projection map tiles, but I did find the next best thing. The "Equal Earth" projection.

This is what it normally looks like:

So, how to flip it and spin it, while maintaining labels and borders?

Thankfully, Tom Patterson at Equal-Earth.com has already done most of the hard work for me.

They already have an 150th meridian East maps designed. Here it is scaled down to 1024px wide:

The full map is 25 MB. Here's a detail from the full size:

It's also available in this gorgeous topographical version:

That's a decent raster image. Thankfully, they provide a vector version. Although sadly (for me) it is in Adobe's proprietary .ai format. They're a couple of hundred MB and can be downloaded from the site.

I've never used Adobe Illustrator before - but I have access via my uni - so I've probably done this in a very inefficient way. But, with a bit of guidance I was able to rotate the map, and then individually rotate all the text labels.

Here's my first attempt:

Zooming in on a bit of detail:

Obviously it isn't quite right yet. Rotating text can shift it quite significantly, and some of the fiddly details need to be corrected. I'll be working on this when time allows - and I hope to sell physical prints soon.

Stay tuned!

I am incredibly grateful to the generosity of Tom Patterson for licencing the map under the following terms:

The Equal Earth Physical Map is in the public domain. You may use the map any way you like, including modifying the content, reproducing it on any type of media, and selling it for profit. Consider it as yours.

I'm not a paying member of the OCSE, but I fully support their aims. Because messing around with maps is fun. So, can I build a web-first maps which is South-up, Pacific-centred, and Peters-projected?

Here's what I managed to do using OpenLayers - an Open Source web maps library which is pretty hackable.

Get started

Following the example documentation gets us a boring North-up map. Booo!

Flip that, reverse it

Rotating a map about 180° is pretty easy:

view: new ol.View({
        maxZoom: 19,
        zoom: 3,
        rotation: Math.PI
})

The rotation option is is radians - so you'll need to remember your GCSE maths in order to recall that Pi radians = 180°. There's a small but significant problem. Everything is upside down. Including the text.

Vectorman

That's because the default tiles use raster images. We need vector images.

layers: [
    new ol.layer.VectorTile({
        source: new ol.source.VectorTile({
            format: new ol.format.MVT(),
            url: 'https://basemaps.arcgis.com/arcgis/rest/services/OpenStreetMap_v2/VectorTileServer/tile/{z}/{y}/{x}.pbf'
        }),
    })
],

That looks a bit dull, so lets add some proper styles to it:

<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/ol-mapbox-style@4.3.1/dist/olms.js"></script>

and

var layer = map.getLayers().getArray()[0];
var url = 'https://www.arcgis.com/sharing/rest/content/items/3e1a00aeae81496587988075fe529f71/resources/styles/root.json'
fetch(url).then(function(response) {
    response.json().then(function(glStyle) {
        olms.applyBackground(map, glStyle);
        olms.applyStyle(layer, glStyle, 'esri');
    });
});

This uses the OpenStreetMap vectors from Arcgis - but it can be changed to any other style you like.

Location, Location, Location

At the moment, the centre of the map is at 0° - with the UK in the centre. That's no good! We want Aotearoa - the land of the long white cloud, and ancestral home of my wife - to be in prime position.

view: new ol.View({
    center: ol.proj.fromLonLat([180, 0]),
    zoom: 3,
    rotation: Math.PI
})

Success!

Projecting

Here's comes the tricky bit. At the moment, we are still using the Mercator Projection which distorts the size of some countries. I'm not going to get into an argument about which projection is best - but I want to show how to re-project an existing map.

With a raster map - where the tiles are bitmaps, not vectors - it's pretty easy.

But when zoomed in, this gives us the worst of both worlds: The place-names are upside-down and are distorted.

Reprojecting Vectors

I naïvely thought this would be easy. Manipulating vectors doesn't sound so hard, does it? But I just can't find any way to do it in OpenLayers. It doesn't work in any web mapping library I've found. And there are no Peters-projection raster tiles either.

I suspect the answer is that I would have to create my own tileset - which is beyond my capabilities.

So, if you know of a way to get a weird projection out of web maps - please let me know in the comments box.

W3W is a closed product. It is a for-profit company masquerading as an open standard. And that annoys me.

A brief primer.

• The world is a sphere.
• We can reference any point on the surface of Earth using two co-ordinates, Longitude and Latitude.
• Long/Lat are numbers. They can be as precise or as vague as needed.
• Humans can't remember long strings of numbers, and reading them out is difficult.

W3W aims to solve this. It splits the world into a grid, and gives every square a unique three-word phrase.

So the location 51.50799,-0.12803 becomes ///mile.crazy.shade

Brilliant, right?

No.

Here's all the problems I have with W3W.

It isn't open

The algorithm used to generate the words is proprietary. You are not allowed to see it. You cannot find out your location without asking W3W for permission.

If you want permission, you have to agree to some pretty long terms and conditions. And understand their privacy policy. Oh, and an API agreement. And then make sure you don't infringe their patents.

You cannot store locations. You have to let them analyse the locations you look up. Want to use more than 10,000 addresses? Contact them for prices!

It is the antithesis of open.

Cost

W3W refuses to publish their prices. You have to contact their sales team if you want to know what it will cost your organisation.

Open standards are free to use.

Earthquakes

When an earthquake struck Japan, street addresses didn't change but that their physical location did.

That is, a street address is still 42 Acacia Avenue - but the Longitude and Latitude has changed.

Perhaps you think this is an edge case? It isn't. Australia is drifting so fast that GPS can't keep up.

How does W3W deal with this? Their grid is static, so any tectonic activity means your W3W changes.

Internationalisation

Numbers are fairly universal. Lots of countries use 0-9. English words are not universal. How does W3W deal with this?

Is "cat.dog.goose" straight translated into French? No! Each language has its own word list.

There is no way to translate between languages. You have to beg W3W for permission for access to their API. They do not publish their word lists or the mappings between them.

So, if I want to tell a French speaker where ///mile.crazy.shade is, I have to use ///embouchure.adjuger.saladier

Loosely translated back as ///mouth.award.bowl an entirely different location!

You're not allowed to know what word lists W3W use. They take a paternalistic attitude to creating their lists - they know best. You cannot propose changes.

Anecdotally, their non-English word lists are confusing even for native speakers.

Cultural Respect

Numbers are (mostly) culturally neutral. Words are not. Is "mile.crazy.shade" a respectful name for a war memorial? How about ///tribes.hurt.stumpy for a temple?

How do you feel about ///weepy.lulls.emerge and ///grouchy.hormone.elevating both being at Auschwitz? Or ///klartext.bestückt.vermuten - "cleartext stocked suspect"?

This is a classic computer science problem. Every sufficiently long word list can eventually be recombined into a potentially offensive phrase.

Open Washing

W3W know that the majority of technical people are not fooled by their attempts to lock down addressing.

They include this paragraph to attempt to prove their openness:

If we, what3words ltd, are ever unable to maintain the what3words technology or make arrangements for it to be maintained by a third-party (with that third-party being willing to make this same commitment), then we will release our source code into the public domain. We will do this in such a way and with suitable licences and documentation to ensure that any and all users of what3words, whether they are individuals, businesses, charitable organisations, aid agencies, governments or anyone else can continue to rely on the what3words system.

I don't know how they propose to bind a successor organisation. They don't say what licences they will use. If they go bust, there's no guarantee they'll be legally able to release this code, nor may they have the time to do so.

There's nothing stopping W3W from releasing their algorithms now, subjecting them to scrutiny by the standards community. They could build up a community of experts to help improve the system, they could work with existing mapping efforts, they could help build a useful and open standard.

But they don't. They guard their secrets and actively promote their proprietary product in the hope it will become widely accepted and then they can engage in rent-seeking behaviour.

This is not a new argument

My mate Leigh wrote about this three years ago. Lots of people have criticised W3W.

Andy Allan @gravitystorm@gravitystorm.co.uk

@gravitystorm

.@what3words is bad technical idea, and ethically terrible too. But all VCs like patented economic rents so the juggernaut rolls on. #geomob

---

But W3W have a great PR team - pushing press releases which are then reported as uncritical news.

The most recent press release contains a ludicrous example:

• Person dials the emergency services
• Person doesn't know their location
• Emergency services sends the person a link
• Person clicks on link, opens web page
• Web page geolocates user and displays their W3W location
• Person reads out their W3W phrase to the emergency services

Here's the thing... If the person's phone has a data connection - the web page can just send the geolocation directly back to the emergency services! No need to get a human to read it out, then another human to listen and type it in to a different system.

There is literally no need for W3W in this scenario. If you have a data connection, you can send your precise location without an intermediary.

What Next?

W3W succeeds because it has a superficially simple solution to a complex problems. It is a brilliant lesson in how marketing and PR can help a technologically inferior project look like it is a global open solution.

I'm not joking. Their branding firm says:

Edelman helped what3words frame their story to be compelling by tapping into human emotion. We also created a story for CEO Chris Sheldrick about how having an address can drive social transformation and business efficiency, securing profiling and speaker opportunities. Through paid social campaigns we re-targeted these stories, getting through to the decision makers that mattered most. We articulated their purpose narrative and refined their strategy to engage investors and excite the media.

It takes too much time to refute all their claims - but we must. Whenever you see people mentioning What3Words, politely remind them that it is not an open standard and should be avoided.

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Your periodic reminder that W3W is a closed and proprietary system, with opaque licencing, hefty pricing, and poor internationalisation.
It does have a very good PR team though.

BBC News Technology

@BBCTech

Three-unique-words 'map' used to rescue mother and child bbc.in/2FBnJ5O

---

---

Recently, I've been trying Nokia's new Here maps for Android. There's a lot to like about the app (more on that later) but it really doesn't handle British roundabouts particularly well.

Here are two screenshots I took of the same stretch of road. Nokia Here is on the left, Google Maps on the right.

At a glance, Nokia Maps tells me that I should be turning left. That's incorrect. The "2" icon - indicating the 2nd exit - has a higher cognitive load that a simple arrow. And anyone who has experienced the pleasure of Britain's roads knows that roundabouts often have sneaky exits which aren't immediately apparent.

Looking through the driving directions Nokia provides, it appears that all of its roundabout icons instruct the driver to turn left. I've scaled that image down so it should appear about the same size as you would see it on a smartphone. Can you make out the little notches and numbers?

Localisation doesn't just mean spelling "colour" correctly - it also means taking into account other cultural quirks like driving on the "wrong" side of the road, when to give way, and roundabouts.

That said, there are lots of things I do like about Nokia Here.

• Cleaner interface. Google seems to think I need to know the name of every side street I pass, Nokia keeps it distraction free.
• Speed limit - and current speed. In the UK it's fairly common to go from a 50MPH zone to 30MPH and back again in just a couple of metres (don't you just love our half-arsed metric conversion?!). In my observations, the Nokia app provided accurate speed limit information and, helpfully, played a sound over the car's Bluetooth speakers when the limit was being broken.
• The traffic estimate in the bottom right corner is interesting. I'm not sure how useful it is to tell me how long I'll be stuck in a jam.
• While I rarely use voice directions, I found Nokia's speech synthesis to be moderately clearer than Google's. There was also a wide variety of voices from which to choose.
  

On to the superior aspects of Google's navigation solutions.

• The 3D depth offers a better view of the road ahead. While both apps will automatically zoom depending on speed, I felt like Google allowed me to see further.
• Journey time. Both apps show the Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA) - which can be really useful. More often than not, I want to know how long until I get to my destination. With Nokia I have to glance at the small clock in the top right, then down to the bottom of the app, then perform some mental calculation in order to know that I've got 20 more minutes left. That's an increased mental load compared to the glance needed on Google.
• Alternate routes. Again, both apps will helpfully suggest an alternate route should a faster journey time become apparent. Google places a button on screen which will quickly show all possible routes if you're sat in traffic.

Both apps work well. If Nokia could work out how roundabouts are supposed to work, the Here app would be a strong contender for my primary navigation app. As it is, I suspect many users will have grown used to Google's interface and - assuming they don't radically change it - will not want the added mental burden of trying use a new app while driving.

I've just received this email from Nate Tyler at Google.

Hope you're enjoying the weekend. I work on the Google Maps team and just saw your post on Google Maps navigation. Thank you very much for the concern. Wanted to be sure you and your readers are aware that we have pushed an update to the latest release of Maps for Mobile to fix this issue. If there's any chance to update your story with this information we would very much appreciate that. And if you have any questions please feel free to email me back.

A quick drive around my neighbourhood confirms that the update (7.0.1) has fixed the roundabout issue. Well done Google for a swift resolution.

Round and Round and Round We Go

A lot of ink has been spilled over the sudden and unwelcome removal of useful features from the new Google Maps. The lack of easy offline support, and the brutal removal of Latitude are deeply annoying. Worryingly, I think there has been a substantial change which is potentially very dangerous for drivers relying on Google Maps for navigation.

One of the core principles of usability is that in high stress situations, information should be available at a glance. When the user only has a fraction of a second to glance at the display - the most relevant information must be displayed in a simple, predictable, and accurate manner.

Now, take a look at this screenshot of the driving directions Google Maps gave me.

The top bar is designed for glancing at. A quick flick of my eyes tells me to turn left on to Oriental Road.

If I spend longer looking at the screen - and take my eyes away from the road for more time - I'll see that I need to turn right.

Which is it? I now have two conflicting pieces of information. It is probably correct to follow the blue line. This interface is now ambiguous, which means I have to spend more time figuring out which aspect of the UI to trust, and less time concentrating on the road.

We've all driven in stressful situations - how much more stressful would it be if you suddenly found out your map was lying to you?

This isn't an isolated incident. Yesterday, I noticed the discrepancy on both major and minor roads.

I've trusted Google Maps to get me to job interviews on time, to drive through unfamiliar cities in foreign countries, and stop me driving the wrong way late at night.

It is irresponsible to have your user interface contradict itself - worse than that, in the case of apps designed to be used a 70MPH it's potentially very dangerous.

This usually manifests itself in strange internal struggles over the heart of a product as different teams compete for their "vision" to succeed.

What often happens is that the user is forgotten and a manager, somewhere, has to make a compromise which sacrifices usability for intra-company harmony.

Let's take, for example, Google Maps for Android. This is an app I use every day and it's becoming clear to me that it is a battleground in some internal Google war. Have a look at this map. What is the difference between these two starred locations?

No? Me neither. I've starred both at some time in the past. Now I want to un-star them. Yet, for some utterly incomprehensible reason, the UIs of the two locations are totally different!

Why? I mean WTF?

I sort of get that one is a "place" whereas the other is just an "address" - hence the "reviews" section.

But that doesn't explain why does one of them has a white star to indicate there is a yellow star on the map - and the other one has a more intuitive yellow star.

Even if there is a good reason that this user is missing - I can't understand why the stars are in totally different locations on the screen.

Why is there a big picture on one and a small picture on the another?

I can't rely on muscle memory to hit the "directions" button" because it's displaced by a couple of thumb widths in the two different screens.

And all that is ignoring whether a score of 22 is good! (Is that a percent or is it out of 25?)

Even within a single product, Google's teams aren't held to a single UI standard. It's similar to the Android project as a whole - there is no single design language which every team is complying with.

It's unprofessional and deeply frustrating to the user.

Using Google Maps to provide route guidance in the UK is a challenging affair. Driving through Reading, the computerised voice continually mispronounced is as "Reading".

Err... that is to say, it should have said "ˈrɛdɪŋ" instead it said "ˈriːdɪŋ" - that is, "red-ing" rather than "reed-ing".

Ok, hetronyms are a notoriously difficult to get right - even for humans. Without context, it's hard to know which pronunciation should be used.

But, I've heard my sat-nav pronounce "Woking" as "Wokk-ing" rather than the correct "Woe-king". Vexing to those living there, distracting for those relying on accurate directions.

A few weeks ago, my wife and I learned that a friend of ours was getting married in Canandaigua, New York. While not as linguistically complex as, say, Poughkeepsie, it caused some consternation in our household. How can you travel to a location you can't even pronounce?

That's when we stumbled across the curiously named "HowJSay.com" - it supplies audio samples of people speaking particular words. So now I know how Canandaigua is pronounced.

I wonder if there is any sensible way to crowd-source pronunciation for a mapping project like OpenStreetMap. Sadly, Google Maps doesn't have a way to contribute language changes and the less said about Apple Maps the better!

There have been some discussion on OpenStreetMap mailing lists (in 2008) and there is a proposed phonetics feature (from 2010).

This is not a minor problem, Wikipedia lists hundreds of UK place names with counter-intuitive pronunciation.

There's no direct harm in a sat-nav mispronouncing a town or street name - although it can be very annoying for anyone expecting the correct vocalisation.

So, should modern maps allow for the correct pronunciation of place names? I think they should. That then draws us to an interesting question about regional pronunciation. An Englishman, Scotsman, and American all walk in to a bar - they each pronounce the word "Edinburgh" very differently. Who is right?

I leave you with one of Richard Lederer's hetronymic poems to enjoy.

As a base experiment, I passed the postcode of a polling station (GU22 7DT) to both Google Maps and Yahoo Maps. Here are the results.

-

Two things of interest to note.

Firstly, Google has a specific "Mobile" call in the API, it reformats the map image to be more readable on the mobile - I think you'll agree that Google edges out Yahoo here.

Secondly, Google maps is less accurate than Yahoo! Maps. Severely so. While maps.google.com is highly accurate when passed a postcode, the API seems only to look at the first part and discard the rest. Yahoo on the other hand is unnervingly precise.

What to do? Well, as all the cool kids are doing, let's have ourselves a mashup!

We can call Yahoo Maps to get the Latitude and Longitude of a postcode thusly http://local.yahooapis.com/MapsService/V1/geocode?appid=YD-9G7bey8_JXxQP6rxl.fBFGgCdNjoDMACQA--&zip=gu227dt&state=uk This will return <Latitude>51.318691</Latitude> <Longitude>-0.543540</Longitude> <Address/> <City>Woking, GU22 7DT</City> <State>United Kingdom</State> <Country>GB</Country> We take the Latitude and Longitude and pass it to Google Maps like so http://maps.google.com/staticmap?center=$lat,$long&markers=$lat,$long,tiny&zoom=14&size=240x240&maptype=mobile&key=&sensor=false Which nets us this map.

Google Map from Yahoo Geo Location

Hey presto! Better looking than the Yahoo Map and better accuracy than the Google Map.

The geocoding prescision of the Google Maps API is very poor for UK postcodes. There really shouldn't need to be this need sort of work around.

This is the sort of data that the UK government should be providing. The Ordnance Survey have an API but it seems restricted to JavaScript which isn't very useful for most mobile phones. Nevertheless I'll have a play with it and see if it's more useful.

Edit

I am now using Ernest Marples' Postcode Latitude/Longitude Lookup API which has much greater accuracy than either Google or Yahoo.