An airline pilot believes he has come up with a solution to the problem of finding rural locations.
Henry Brewis, from Hawstead, a village south of Bury St Edmunds, has developed an app to pinpoint addresses that may otherwise be tricky to locate.
Living in a rural setting, the 52-year-old knows only too well the difficulties of relying on sat-nav systems, which at times lead to delivery drivers getting lost or stuck down narrow lanes.
The father-of-two said he thought it was “ridiculous” in this day and age there was not an easier way to pinpoint other people’s addresses so he came up with ‘Polocode’ – a name based on ‘postcode’ and the traveller Marco Polo. Created by Sudbury firm Ansta Ltd, the free app has attracted more than 400 users since it was launched about seven weeks ago.
People create a code name, or ‘polocode’, capture their location using their mobile phone and can add a photograph.
It gets people to within five metres of the location.
Mr Brewis, whose wife is also a pilot, said: “I thought you can get your GPS (global positioning system) position on a phone very easily, but you cannot ring up a takeaway and say ‘I am 52 degrees north-east’.
“As an airline pilot you fly from point to point and inputting the latitude and longitude in the computer there’s scope for error so in the flying world they give lots of places names.
“I thought you could actually apply that to an app and people could download their exact position and give a name, and that could be their own name or the name of their house, and then I thought they could upload a photo of their house.”
Mr Brewis said in the past he had seen delivery drivers passing his house looking for his address – which has a house name, not number.
“We have got 18 addresses within the same postcode and only about three of them have got numbers. They are all house names.
“I have even had to redirect an ambulance three times in the past year,” he said.
He said the app could also prove useful at festivals, for instance if you were trying to locate somebody by a tent.
“The app would work worldwide,” he said. “It’s not just Suffolk or England, it would work in America or all of the world. If it takes off it would be great.”
For more information or to download the app visit www.polocode.co.uk
Find Polocode on Facebook.
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