I’m entering my 4th quarter here of “officially” working as a consultant. I want to take some time and thank everyone who has made this experience so rewarding so far. Thanks for the work, the support, the lessons learned and the innovative ideas – it has all been worthwhile.

The work I’ve come into has helped to focus what it is that I hope to provide to my clients and it has better focused what I hope to accomplish in my consulting life. For that reason I’m going to take some time off from my regular Monday-Friday schedule of posting to this site. I’ll continue to keep you up-to-date on what I’m doing but it will be less frequent. The schedule for this is the month of March and April; after that I’ll return to a more regular schedule.

During this time I plan on doing some retooling around here while I continue to work with my clients on meeting their needs. As always I’ll be looking for feedback – my community always knows best.

If you aren’t currently subscribed to my RSS feed I would recommend you do so now so that you don’t miss anything that pops up over the next 2 months. You can grab that here:

http://andrew-miller.com/feed/

Thanks again for your interest, your support and your business. As always, if you’ve got a project you need help with or need a speaker for your event please contact Andrew Miller Consulting by clicking here.

Have a great spring!

Foursquare is a somewhat popular mobile based application that allows you to “check-in” to locations and provides information about where you are to your friends (or to your larger social networks if you choose) and depending on how often you check-in at any one particular location you can earn points and even real-life rewards from certain businesses.

Right now businesses are taking advantage of this information as a way of luring new customers and rewarding loyal customers. One Facebook friend posted:

Attentive businesses will use this information to their advantage in this way. I think that’s great. There is a problem though – many people are very leery of using a location based application that gives away their position so freely. In fact one enterprising organization – Please Rob Me - is using its cynicism about location based tech to invite would be criminals to watch for when you are away from home.

So what would I look for in a next generation of something like Foursquare? Well, why not put the ownness on businesses to accurately map their location using GPS co-ordinates. By doing this you, as an individual, could sign up for this type of service and just by having your phone enabled the application could pick up on what business you were patronizing. By using an anonymous id businesses could instead push rewards to you instead of waiting for you to announce yourself. Keeping with the anonymous id the application could inform other users of how many people are currently at any given location. This doesn’t mean you would have to make everyone anonymous; like how the applications work now you could allow people to share more of their personal location information if they choose too. The key however is that the anonymity option would still allow businesses and users to connect without a direct, transparent relationship.

I believe these tweaks would greatly open up the use of location based applications to a broader user base. What do you think?

Leadership UA, a leadership organization in Upper Arlington, hosted their annual leadership panel. As a board member of Leadership UA we are working to do a better job of making these events available to a larger audience. To that effect I have embedded the video from the event below.