The lack of addresses affects women and equality!
International Women’s Day 2019 is all about thinking equal, building smart, innovating for change! How does this relate to addresses you might wonder? Addresses are part of essential infrastructure and support effective communication around location. Map Project has...
Addressing for reunification in refugee situations
Map Project meets Agnes Björn from Plan International and entrepreneur Johan Attby to explore opportunities for supporting reunification of displaced children and families with the use of Map Project addressing app.
Learn more about our journey with #sassholarship.
Evening with Map Project
The power of crowd Yesterday, 60 people from more than 15 countries came together to dig deeper into challenges around addressing and what modern technology and social entrepreneurship can do about it. We had invited to an “Evening with Map Project” and wanted to...
We are hiring
Map Project is expanding, are you one of our next colleagues? Currenly we are looking for UI/UX designer, React Native app developer, Firebase Backend Engineer. Read more about our job offers and send a message to our CTO Maria.
Map Project awarded Impact Maker
Map Project wins the Impact Maker award at the Venture Cup region East final 2018. Impact Maker is a special award for startups with strong social or sustainable impact.
Map Project is through to the final in Venture Cup East 2018!
Map Project is one step closer to solve the 4 billion people challenge. Stockholm, May 9th, 2018: Stockholm based startup, Map Project, is through to the finals in Venture Cup East startup competition 2018. Competition was fierce this year - almost 430 startups...
How does the GDPR hold up in East Africa?
Privacy, Security and Trust are important to us! We always develop with the integrity of the individual users at the centre. We have designed our system so that our users know exactly what personal information is collected and are in charge of...
Map Project wins SAS Scholarship!
Map Project has been awarded SAS Scholarship. The Scholarship is awarded to three ideas that have the potential to change the world. The Scholarship opens up new opportunities to reach out with our product and speed up development and research.
Map Project nominated to the Stockholm City Innovation Scholarship
Map Project was nominated to the 2017 Stockholm City Innovation Scholarship and was among the top three innovations in the category Social impact and sustainability.
New partnership for testing a digital addressing system for all!
map project is partnering with Urban ICT Arena to test their addressing platform developed to provide physical addresses for everyone!
Faces of addresses
We are all Faces of Addresses!
Same address, wrong place?
I had been accepted to a dancing school outside Lisbon, Portugal. I looked up the address on the map service on my phone. It pointed me in the direction of a village an hour away that seemed rather easy to find and a friend was going to drive me there.
We found the village and after a while the street where the school should be. But there was only this huge, empty, scary looking building. I feared I had paid for a school that didn’t exist. So, I called the number I had for the school and after talking to the headmaster I understood that we were indeed on the right street, only in the wrong village.
The school was situated in a smaller village with THE SAME NAME. With the help of locals, we finally arrived at the right place!
Wrong subway station
I remember my first time in China when I had no other option, but to get one, in order to be on time for my meeting. My Chinese wasn’t so good, so I simply showed the address where I wanted to go (it was a SPECIFIC subway entrance of a SPECIFIC subway station – easy right?) and the taxi driver agreed to take me there. After 10 minutes of driving, he stopped, pointed out the name of the street in Chinese and the subway line above us and said that we are EXACTLY where I wanted to be. I paid him and rushed for the meeting. Soon I came to realize that it was exit C, not D (and I hadn’t noticed that from the distance) so I still had to find the right exit… After some time I managed to get there. I was surprised to see that the person who I was supposed to meet was not there… I decided to call her and imagine my surprise when she told me that she was standing right in front of the exit D and she couldn’t see me. She asked me if I was sure that I was at the right place and it turned out that I wasn’t! It was a DIFFERENT subway station.
“It used to be orange”
Let me tell you about one of my cab rides in Costa Rica. I was there to visit my host family. I had been down to the river and was going to take a taxi back to the city centre. I called to get a cab but since it was kind of a steep hill down to the river they asked me to go to a more easy-to-reach meeting point, namely: “ “the house on the hill with the door that was once orange”.. I ended up walking around the area and looking for that door for half an hour before the driver actually found me. To this day, I have no idea what colour it might be!
Lost in the neighborhood
We recently got a new colleague working with us. We were excited to invite him to the workshop, and really looking forward to his visit to Stockholm. We had arranged to use a flat at Lilla Essingen and I had been given the key. The number of the street was 37, and with the keys in my hand I looked it up on Google maps. To my surprise it was close down by the water, which did not make sense to me as I knew the location of some of the other doors on that street. I was right. It was not the right place. So I started looking for it, but the location on the map was incorrect and the numbers of the street were not leading there. I was lost! Turns out that number 37, was next to number 51. Streets and number are usually very organized in Sweden, so I could not even have imagined. It took me 20 minutes to find the place, and I was never more than 200 meters away.
New addresses don’t work
We have got a new addressing system in part of the capital Kampala. But people are not really using it yet as the new street names are not uploaded to the online map. A customer can stand next to the street sign and tell me the name and I cannot find it on the map in my taxi app. When I finally find the customer we realise that the street names differ. I hope they will soon upload the new names to the map. That could be useful for us!