I have often wondered why do we persist with pre-gps digital addresses. The digital coordinates, which nowadays accurately measure down to the last 10 metres, can be an effective, and standardised address that would work for everyone, anywhere in the world - even if you live somewhere out of a tent in a desert.
The idea is so simple and the same time very powerful and is fairly intuitive. For e.g. all you have to do is provide a number like - 28.569009, 77.352630 and no other details! And even the numbers have a meaning. For e.g. 77 tells you about the timezone immediately and a combination of 28,77 tells you the country more or less and soon there would be a vocabulary around it. Somewhat like it is like with pincodes today or used to be with landline phones where you could figure where a person was living based on the exchange code. Or like the bus route numbers - and like everything that is denoted by numbers - they are unique, simple and build unique and very objective associations with symbols and images.
It frees up people from remembering things like pincode (or zip) details, street numbers, house numbers, crossings, landmarks that go into making an address today. And as the format is universal, it means that you could print a label that would be machine readable and stick it onto packages. Your calling card would have just your name, organisation name and just the GPS coordinates - perhaps that would impact the shape and size of the calling cards as well!
That brings us to the problem of floors in highrises. Just for the solution to be elegant, one could add sealevel! But I think mentioning the floor along with the GPS should do the trick. With GPS chips getting embedded into devices like smartphones and tablets, this is an idea whose time has come. I wonder if that would completely change the way the door to door business is done today. Perhaps there would be impact on the efficiencies of how goods and services are distributed....
It is indeed a wonder why this has not been adopted by people across the world. I would have thought, at least people like Fedex and UPS would have started experimenting with it - the formats of their Airwaybills - still on paper would change - resulting in probably huge savings- booking, sorting, routing and the whole lot of other operations.
Maybe I should do a proper technical paper on this!
