INTRODUCING THE FIRST GLOBAL ADDRESS REGISTRATION SYSTEM

Imagine someone wanting to send you a letter, but he can't write your mailing address. "An illiterate writing a letter? This can't be for real!"
"Well, this seemingly contradictory situation happened to me after I moved to the People's Republic of China" says Gunnar Lindenblatt. "My parents, friends, former colleagues, as well as insurance companies and public authorities were not able to write my Chinese address. You can write an address in China using the Latin alphabet, but this has to be 'processed' through a central international post office, where the address is converted into the

local language. This takes time, and if the sender makes a small mistake, omitting one letter can take your letter to a city thousands of miles away from the intended destination."
"One letter took five months to arrive, because the company wrote 'Taiwan' as the receiver's country", Gunnar smiles.
Captivated by the idea of making the writing of a mailing address as easy as ABC, Gunnar sat down and programmed an Internet-based address database called 'service d'adresse mondial' (worldwide address service), or in short SAM (URL: http://sam.vitadata.net/).
"The idea is that the receiver registers his address at SAM, because he knows how to write it correctly. He, then, gets an eight letter long string, a so-called SAM code, which looks somewhat like AB.CD.EF.GH. The sender can then use this SAM code to get the correctly written and formatted address—even if it's in Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian or whatever!"
"As for the sender of a letter, there's no need to install special software or additional foreign-language fonts because the address is sent as a picture to his Internet browser (such as MS Internet Explorer or Firefox)", Gunnar explains. "The address can be printed directly onto an envelope or an address label, or you just 'drag'n'drop' the bitmap into your favourite word processing software."
Why so much effort for a simple mailing address? "Sure. Most correspondence is done by e-mail nowadays. But the need for paper documents still exists. I was surprised to learn from other expats that they have to deal with the same problem in Japan and Korea.
Now businessmen are starting to include their SAM code on their name cards. A Swedish business man told me that he is using SAM 'in the opposite direction': his Chinese business partners print out his Swedish address which to them contains 'a handful of strange dots and squiggles', he said."
"And there are numerous expats using the database to stay in contact with friends in the same way as I do." says the programmer, reporting on some of his initial successes.
This service is entirely for free.