[timwiththebo]

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 [e-mail].

[notahacker]

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?

[ColinWright]

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.

[drivingmenuts]

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

[drivingmenuts]

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.

[BrandonMarc]

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.

[pantalaimon]

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