This article was taken from the February 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.

How do retailers deliver a parcel to a Rio favela or an unlisted Kampala backstreet? Chris Sheldrick has a solution -- split the globe into named squares. "Three quarters of the world have incomplete or inadequate addresses and about two thirds don't have an address at all," says the 33-year-old British entrepreneur. "In Dubai, India and many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, surprisingly large parts of the cities have no street names." Even in the UK, postcodes don't always work.

So, Sheldrick cut up the Earth into 3m x 3m squares and gave each one a unique name. To do this, he generated 57 trillion combinations of 40,000 English words (excluding all homophoness and offensive ones), grouped together in threes -- hence the company name, what3words. All of the three-word combinations refer to a 9m2 area. The WIRED office entrance, for instance, is located at seats.shades.bugs. "GPS co-ordinates are accurate, but they are 16 digits plus four letters, a decimal point and then a positive or negative symbol.

It's impossible for most people to remember," he says. "We're just putting a human-friendly layer on top."

The what3words mapping app can plot any three-word address and then lets you navigate to the locations, using Google Maps, Apple's Maps or Waze. The system has now expanded into eight languages, including French, Spanish, German and Russian, and is trialling versions in Swahili, Greek and Arabic. "We give the shortest, most common words in a language to the towns and cities in the world where the language is spoken most, then the next 'best' words to the rural areas in the world, then the most awkward, long words to the sea, where we are very unlikely to have users," Sheldrick says. "We want to become a geographic standard."

This article was originally published by WIRED UK