A new delivery concept uses the location of random strangers to TwedEx parcels directly to you – wherever you are

Hand-delivered by TwedEx (Image: Radius Images/Alamy)

JANE yawns and climbs the stairs from the subway at 145th Street, New York. She’s almost home. A stranger rises from a bench as she approaches, catching her eye. “Jane Murphy?” She nods. “Here’s your package.”

This is the ultimate aim of a crowd-powered delivery system dreamed up by a group of Microsoft researchers. Fictional Jane never has to deviate from her normal route to pick up her package. Instead, it is sent via a chain of people – an algorithm calculates the fastest route using aggregated location data from New York tweeters. Eric Horvitz of Microsoft Research in Seattle, Washington, calls the concept TwedEx. The idea could make it possible to deliver purchases to customers on the move, as well as making it cheaper to send them.

Basic crowdsourced systems already exist, which hire strangers from the internet to deliver packages. But TwedEx is different because it taps into existing human journeys. All the sender need do is write the recipient’s unique identifier on the package, their Twitter handle, for example, and let the TwedEx algorithm and the crowd do the rest.


By learning people’s average movements from their past Twitter data, TwedEx predicts which people to hand a package to at intermediate locations based on the package’s final destination. A user would tell the network they had a package, the system would work out the best route and then each person in the chain would be told who to give the parcel to, as well as where, and when.

TwedEx predicts which people to hand a package to at each stage based on its final destination

Citizen couriers would be paid a small incentive to carry packages – depending how far out of their way they go to deliver or receive one.

In simulations, TwedEx works remarkably well. “We see that the typical time to get across the country is just five hours,” Horvitz says, explaining that packages can make it from New York to San Francisco in that time even when they don’t begin their journey next to the airport. Real world packages would be held up by factors such as airport security.

A real life TwedEx wouldn’t need to track people in real time to set up a delivery chain. It would just send out messages to people along the possible route, asking them to make the exchange at a certain place and time. Bulky items could be divided up among multiple couriers.

TwedEx can cover 50 per cent of New York if each link in the delivery chain waits up to 30 minutes and deviates up to 100 metres off-course from their usual route at exchange points.

You can also expand TwedEx’s coverage by increasing the amount of time an individual in the delivery chain waits at transfer points for the package to reach them, and the distance they must deviate from their normal path, Horvitz says.

A paper describing the system will be presented at the AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media in Boston in July. So far, TwedEx only exists in a simulation, but Horwitz says Microsoft is discussing building an app for a real-world pilot.

Adam Sadilek, who worked on TwedEx but is now at Google, says the most viable initial scenario for TwedEx would be in poor countries. “You can imagine using this for the distribution of vaccines,” he says.

Another group is already working on making this a reality. James McInerney of the University of Southampton, UK, told the NetMobs conference in Boston earlier this month about a crowdsourced delivery system for rural communities in the Ivory Coast. McInerney’s system maps people’s movements via their cellphone data logs, provided by telecoms firm Orange.

“This would all be done by text,” says McInerney. “Each participant would receive a text if they’ve been chosen by the algorithm, with the pickup and destination information, and they’d just have to follow their normal mobility patterns.”

In McInerney’s model, delivery time to remote areas would be 28 days. This is much longer than a dedicated van would take, but he sees the network as a delivery route for regular supplies, rather than irregular purchases, as it would be in US cities.

At least one of the US’s largest companies is already thinking about using the crowd for deliveries. In March, Reuters reported that Wal-Mart is considering using its own customers to build a delivery network for goods bought online, and that the idea is in the early planning stages. A DHL concept called Bring Buddy was floated at Expo 2010 in China, but has since disappeared.

Wal-Mart is considering using its own customers to build a delivery network for goods bought online

And Horvitz isn’t the only one who dreams of postal addresses that match people, not places. Matternet co-founder Andreas Raptopoulos says the ultimate vision for his company is to build a delivery system that uses a network of drones (see “The drone is flying it to you now“), with package delivery reaching the same level of abstraction as the delivery of email on smartphones. “An email doesn’t care where you are, we want to do the same with physical packages,” he says.

The drone is flying it to you now Matternet is aptly named. The firm’s CEO Andreas Raptopoulos is building an internet for stuff, which can transport small items over short distances using flying drones. The drones will be suitcase-sized and should cost less than $5000 each, while maintaining a 10-kilometre range. Each will have on-board sensing systems that are sophisticated enough to land the drone at drop-off targets that are smaller than GPS can handle. “We are in early phase discussions with the TNT courier company in Europe,” Raptopoulos says. “They work with the UN as a food distribution partner and we are working out where Matternet fits in the infrastructure chain.”

This article appeared in print under the headline “You’ve got chain mail”