The three words that can save your life
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Honestly I'm a bit annoyed by this article because it looks like an ad since it's a private commercial system.
Another similar geo location system, if I'm not wrong created by Google but released with a liberal license (Apache) and not patent encumbered, is called "plus.codes".
Edit: according to Wikipedia they were founded in 2013, don't recall why I thought they were older...
I haven't worked a lot with geolocation yet. But I'm driven to it because of my geography background, and I would be mad if every service for that kind of work was closed and proprietary.
Works when you aren’t able to talk (clearly) or when you can’t look at the screen (injury, screen broken).
Disadvantage: location information will be less precise.
On second thoughts, how do you even? I know I've done it before, but doing anything in google maps always takes me 15 minutes of searching howtos - just awful UI.
oh, you have to drop a pin first, and then share that. It seems like 'share my current location', without turning on tracking for an hour or whatever, would be a fairly obvious use-case.
+10 to dispatchers for a clever hack. -100 to governments for an emergency dispatch system that fails to actually be an emergency dispatch system.
In addition, what3words is copyrighted and patented and doesn't have a published standard.
”AML was developed in the United Kingdom by British Telecom, EE Limited, and HTC as a solution to problematic caller location in emergencies. When a person in distress calls the emergency services with a smart-phone where AML is enabled, the telephone automatically activates its location service to establish its position and sends this information to the emergency services via an SMS.[3] The services uses either a global navigation satellite system or WiFi depending on which one is better at the given moment”
This works, will shortly be required in the EU, but requires changes to your phone’s software and a change in the law (implicitly sharing your location is a privacy invasion)
It also still may be less accurate than you putting a marker on the map (but then, how good are people in distress in placing such a marker?)