I would think the latter would be much smaller to keep on one's phone.
the surface area of the earth divided by 9 square meters is around 57 trillion (source: wolfram|alpha ) , so for word triples, you would only need around 4000 words stored in the phone. But, that wouldn't have the redundancy (any of the 3 words wrong would get the wrong result), so if you have any two of the words be enough to encode the result (so, getting 1 word wrong would result in the area you mean, and maybe two other areas you didn't mean), then you need uh, about 8 million words?
I'm not sure english has that many words.
oh wait maybe its only on land.
That would uh, actually only help a little...
Ok I don't understand their claim that it is redundant, but I'm pretty sure they don't /need/ to make it use a central lookup table when you can just convert coords into lists of words.
IDK if they have their algo being open though. If they don't I guess I should make an open clone of it, because not having it be open is dumb. A standard to refer to a location should be open if it is to be useful.
For example, it was nearly impossible to use a cellphone in downtown NYC in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack.
The backup plan would be to have a local copy of the database cached on everyone's phone, but that would take up a lot of space.
Also, who is going to translate the database into every language used in the world? Three English words would be as hard for a Chinese speaker to remember as a pair of geographical coordinates.