The What3Words app has been featured a few times on different TWiT shows. It just received a celebrity endorsement from writer Neil Gaiman:
This is in the UK, so AA = Automobile Association.
Well, presumably he could have also just called out a few digits of his lat/long but good stuff no matter what.
I think the logic behind it is that it works well for people who are upset or worried. Anxiety can make people have difficulty in accurately reading a series of digits without making a mistake, whereas they’re more confident with recognisable words.
It’s become increasingly popular with emergency services in the UK. Although the technology exists to capture the location of cell phone calls, like in the US, the majority of emergency call centres have back office systems that were developed before this existed, and no budget to move to newer software, so they can’t pass the location to the call handler. Because W3W works in a web browser, it’s easy for them to add, and because similar sounding words are assigned to geographically distant locations, there’s a built in check against misheard words.