It must be fun city down there if you get 1/2in of snow as well!
Yes we did this week… Chaos!
Just resurrecting this thread as a w3w ref got quoted earlier.
I continue to hope this will die a natural death.
They have posted their 2023 accounts at companies house. What a surprise (not), another massive loss.
2023 £16.4M loss, on £1M turnover, with admin expenses of £21.7M
At 31/12/2023 they had £17.5M left of the over £153M the shareholders have put in since the start.
This compares to
2022 £31.5M loss on £0.8M turnover, with admin expenses of £47.2M.
So, it’s a smaller loss… but only because they’ve massively cut the spend on advertising (notice the ads have disappeared off the TV?) and shed about 30 people from the workforce.
I’m no accountant… but without another capital injection I reckon they’ll run out of money in 2025, unless some miracle comes along. Try as hard as they might… they can’t seem to find hardly anyone willing to pay for it.
They have opened an office in Vietnam. It might just fly out there given the lack of national addressing schemes.
Anyway, some other firm will probably buy up the assets I suspect.
This is a private opinion and should not be taken as financial advice… (as the saying goes).
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all.gone.pearshaped
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Unfortunately it’s becoming common-place in the safety plans we use at Motorsport events eg, stage entrances from the public road, ambulance RV points etc. The one time we had to use it during an incident, a Rescue Team member really struggled to say/spell the words in a way which could be understood over the radio. He had to repeat himself several times. Much simpler to say the grid reference, eg November Oscar one two three three two one.
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How can you lose that much money? After they figured out the words and host a website…what’s left to do?
Perhaps they’re using AWS as hosting.
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Find paying customers.
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Two things
Advertising. A truly massive amount on consumer advertising, especially TV, plus promotion into organisation like Police/Ambulance/Fire. I know they have REALLY pushed it with the emergency services, getting in to see decision makers in those organisations. That takes a lot of effort and a professional sales force…
Which takes you onto the second item.
Staff. They had over 150 staff in the UK… I don’t know what they would all be doing… but I can guess that a lot would be on the sales/promotion side.
This is the MASSIVE issue with it.
The argument is that the software can now spot misspelling/sounds like issues and suggest more local location.
They say that similar sounding 3 word groups don’t appear within a few 10s of km… this has proved to be incorrect on a number of occasions.
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I can’t be bothered digging out all the accounts going back several years since they started ramping up.
But each year they have made losses in the millions of pounds, lately 10s of millions of pounds, vs turnover in the hundreds of thousands.
Lots of subsequently successful startups burn through capital in the first few years. That’s not unusual.
But there’s just such tiny growth in turnover vs expenses.
In fact in 2023 they had even lower turnover in the UK than in 2022… the modest overall group turnover increase came from the German subsidiary.
I can’t see highly tonal languages like Vietnamese or Mandarin being better per Fraser’s point about legibility. Did you mean nước.mắm.chấm or nước.mấm.chấm?
The problem with W3W as I see it is that basically they are expecting you to pay for something that is already provided for free: an address (or a location). Good on them for convincing someone to give them 150M in capital to do that - I just hope they paid themselves a salary and not simply in equity.
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This is a MASSIVE issue, and infact facebook/X/ETC is full of posts by MRTs saying "DO NOT use w3w references where others are available, as they have been known to be wrong and send teams miles in the wrong direction!
I have a simple but effective app on my phone that gives mt lattitude and longitude (in both formats) NGR and (strangely) a maidenhead grid squre down to 1M!
we do use w3w for work sometimes, but its certainly not the norm…
Alan
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