Inspiration
When Humam was in Syria, it was extremely hard for him to guide people to his house since there is no proper address, street number or postal code. It is like that in so many countries; over 70 countries share this problem and most of them are 3rd world countries, which are the countries that don't have it need it most. For that, there is an application that is called What3Words. They assign for each 3m square in the world a unique 3-word address that will never change. The problem that this application faces from most users (UPS drivers, people in need of AAA road assistance, and people with no data) is that this service is only accessible online and users are not allowed to download their database. That is where our SMS service comes in handy for users with no access to the internet when they are in need of it, especially since What3Words is used very often for emergencies.
What it does
+Map is a messaging service that users are able to send their 3-word location and get the coordinates back or send their coordinates to the phone number and the user will get the 3-word address. Users can use the service in 35 different languages.
How we built it
We used the Twilio api to create a phone number, which posts to an express.js server that uses the what3words API to translate 3-word addresses to precise coordinates, and vice-versa.
Challenges we ran into
The Twilio API is very powerful, and it was our first time using it. This meant that there was a lot of documentation to read through, and we had to be smart about finding the right information to get done what we needed to get done.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are most proud that our product can work in over 100 countries and in over 35 languages. We are also proud that we made our first ever SMS service and our first ever fully-featured Node.JS application, and that we made something that we all strongly feel we should continue working on in the future.
What we learned
We learned to leverage the Twilio and what3words API. We also learned a lot about webhooks, node.JS, express, and Git. We also learned about the benefits and limitations of the SMS protocol.
What's next for +Map
Twilio supports phone number availability in over 100 countries. This will make our service scalable to almost every country in the world. Twilio also has support for the popular messaging application WhatsApp (some providers support data only to WhatsApp)
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