Why Puerto Rico doesn’t get it.

Puerto Rico is a beautiful island run by the the most inept, delusional people I can imagine. It is an island full of potential. Unfortunately it will remain that, a potentially nice place. Emerging economies must be nimble to keep up in the modern digital age. Let’s take a simple example of how to screw up something simple. Maps.

There has been an explosion in the world of travel technology with the advent of Google Maps and other services. Google Maps rules the map marketplace for many reasons as detailed in the Scoble post, but mostly because of the opne API which allows other services to build upon the technology. The services that have spawned from this range for the cutting edge to the inane but they have added so many features to the original service that others will never catch up. Puerto Rico misses out on this very basic jump in techonolgy because we can’t get our maps straight. Let’s take a landmark, one that the average traveller would use, say the Caribe Hilton Hotel. The map services put it in Old San Juan. Not next to San Geronimo, *in* Old San Juan. Now that is simply not going to cut it when people depend on these to get to their travel destinations. It is all because Puerto Rico has never had any intiative to get their maps straight. Maps are pretty much useless if you addressing system in completely FUBAR. Puerto Rico’s address system is beyond repair by any means know to man, barring a tsunami sompletely washing the island clean and giving us the oportunity to start fresh. Perhaps the more fundamental issue is that Puerto Rico and Puertoricans do not regard this as a problem. Or even an issue for that matter. So the world will pass us by. Tourism sould explde if people could actually find where they are supposed to go. Not in Puerto Rico.

Note:

Car navigation systems don’t work here either. I cannot begin to say how many luxury cars there are in Puerto Rico with totally useless navigation systems.