PODMAP app is an online platform, easy to use and with a user-friendly interface, compatible with iOS and Android, and a website, with a registered network of hosts available to receive packages to their locations for their clients, as well as provide additional services, such as further hand-to-hand delivery, safekeeping of packages, and confidentiality.
Hosts can be individuals and organizations.
Clients can choose to remain anonymous. Hosts shall choose their client base.
A parcel dropped in front of a door when the recipient is absent will be vulnerable to theft, weather, and wildlife damage.
According to researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute up to 1.7 million packages stolen or lost every day in the U.S and one in three Americans report having at least one package stolen, resulting in $25 million of lost goods and services every day.
As a solution, a delivery person may be instructed to return the package to their headquarters and have the recipient to come retrieve the package in person. It’s safer but can be inconvenient for the recipient.
Large number of people do not have an official or reliable address that can be used for secure deliveries:
1. Temporarily or permanently displaced, homeless, refugees, etc.
By the end of 2020, 82.4 million individuals were forcibly displaced worldwide as a result of persecution, conflict, violence orhuman rights violations
2. Those who visit for a temporary stay – students, immigrants, migrant and seasonal workers, etc.
3. People who wish to have a secure address in another city or country they plan or frequently visit
The United Nations estimates as many as four billion people live in places where there are no street names or numbers
There are still many places where address systems either do not exist or are not easily accepted by most global shipping companies. Places such as rural dwellings, remote villages, tribal dwellings, unauthorized dwellings, favelas, etc.
For example, In Brazil, the government is not required by law to create streets for buildings with untitled land tenure, and the post office is not required to deliver mail to homes without a legal address
In some countries addresses may not be written in the traditional western system.
Or brand new developments and dwellings may have trouble with their official address being added to the postal system
Ordering delivery to one’s own place of living or work usually requires revealing their identity and address to the sender, which contributes to the identity theft. But what if:
1. A recipient wants to keep their own place of living confidential to the sender?
2. A recipient wants to keep their shipments confidential to their co-habitants? For items such as confidential legal documents, personal items, medical or adult content, or any other shipment that shall not be disclosed
3. A recipient wants to conceal their identity to the sender? Or be weary or unwilling to reveal their identity when retrieving a package? Displaying the recipient’s identity, is often required when retrieving a package, such as from the U.S. Post Office.
The growing shipping industry will demand creation of a universally acceptable and identifiable points of delivery and pick up
PODMAP aims to create a new market in a form of a host registry of individuals and organizations willing and capable of providing services of receiving, safekeeping, and handling deliveries of goods and mail, thus identifying universally recognized and accepted points of delivery (POD) for every potential customer.
This registry will map delivery sites for unmanned deliveries in the future.
At PODMAP, we believe that among other basic human rights are the right to confidentiality and the right to receive shipments even without an official address.
PODMAP platform is a useful tool to engage the general public in the logistics of the future global delivery system.
