William Dillard founded the third largest department store chain in America called, unimaginatively enough, Dillards. No, I didn’t know that either. However, he did come up with the quote, Location, Location, Location when asked about the three most important things to get right when opening a store. This is also another bit of trivia I didn’t know about William Dillard whom, I must confess, I hadn’t heard of prior to researching this article.

Why, you may ask, am I concerned so much about locations today? Well, the answer resides in the code T2X-60-LV8. This is Flesk IT’s postal code in Ireland.

I am quite happy to now have a postal code as I now have something to put in all those online forms that request one but more importantly it is actually quite useful. First and foremost, unlike postal codes in the UK this postal code isn’t really one at all but a location code. Let me explain, in the UK the postal code will identify a group of houses so, in theory, if you put the house number and the postal code on a letter bound for the UK it should find its destination. However, the postal code is not unique for every dwelling and neither does it cover locations that have no home or business to deliver mail too. I was over in the UK recently and while it was handy tapping in the postal code into the GPS so that it could direct me to the vicinity I wanted to be in it still left me with a choice of buildings to choose from.

The Irish system is different. Any location at all can have a code allocated to it and it is unique to that location be it a business, a home or even a field. Type that code into the GPS and it will take you directly to that location with no ambiguity about which dwelling (or field) it refers to. What is more, these codes are available today simply by going to the website http://www.myloc8ion.com/ and following the simple steps to generate a code.

This is particularly good news for Kerry as many place of interest to the tourist can now display an easy-to-use Loc8 code on their website that will allow clients to find them easily. For me, it means the couriers who deliver equipment can now use GPS rather than rining me up to ask directions!