Microsoft Wants To Find The Location Of Every Windows Phone

This is a strange one: apparently, Microsoft is looking to hire "highly motivated, extremely intelligent, and deeply technical people" in order to build a "core location service platform".

The timing is a little bit off: Microsoft has been accused of tracking location without the user's permission and has issued a response. In the light of these events it is not really clever to look for people in order to facilitate and create a "service to find the location of every Windows Phone device in the world, either by assisting GPS, or by using signal-analysis techniques to compute location where GPS cannot".

Here's the complete job description before it got pulled: "The team is looking for highly motivated, extremely intelligent, and deeply technical people to build the core location service platform. We are tasked with delivering a highly scalable service to find the location of every Windows Phone device in the world, either by assisting GPS, or by using signal-analysis techniques to compute location where GPS cannot. You will work closely with MSR and other research groups to improve our algorithms for mining large amounts of data using Bayesian analysis and other machine learning techniques. We have incredibly hard problems to solve in the coming year such as solving the indoor positioning problem as well as motion detection and relevance based positioning."

Needless to say that the job posting, which went up today, has been already pulled. Microsoft is already able to track the location of Windows Phones for its Find My Phone service which does, of course, need the users approval in order to collect data. Either Redmond is looking to improve the already existing service or is into something different which will probably make huge waves.

Source: Microsoft Careers (Pulled)
Via: Neowin

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CVS Wants to Show It Cares About Coupons

The CVS drug store chain is undertaking a humorous effort to encourage customers who are members of its loyalty program to redeem the rebate coupons they receive.

A digital campaign encourages holders of the CVS ExtraCare card to redeem their ExtraBucks rebate coupons on the bottom of cash register receipts.

The digital campaign is aimed at discouraging “money trashers” among the more than 67 million shoppers who carry the CVS ExtraCare loyalty program card.

The trashing part refers to the fact that the coupons for what CVS calls its ExtraBucks rewards are printed out at the bottom of cash register receipts. Only about 49 percent of the ExtraBucks coupons, which are distributed quarterly, are ever redeemed, according to CVS data.

That means lots of money goes unclaimed because shoppers with ExtraCare cards receive 2 percent back on future CVS purchases for most of the merchandise they buy. Exceptions include alcohol, lottery tickets and prescriptions.

(Full disclosure: this reporter is a card-carrying member of the ExtraCare program. His most recent ExtraBucks rebate totaled $2.50 and was promptly redeemed.)

The campaign includes entreaties like “Don’t be an ExtraBucks Money Trasher,” “Don’t let your ExtraBucks rewards go to waste” and this declaration: “Don’t be a Money Trasher. Millions throw away their ExtraBucks rewards. It’s time to stop.”

The fight against “money trashing” brings to mind a long-ago campaign from General Electric to encourage consumers to buy more of its light bulbs.

The G.E. campaign urged, “Don’t be a bulb snatcher” — that is, someone who replaces a bulb that burns out with a working one from another lamp or light fixture. The better course, according to G.E., was to always have plenty of packages of light bulbs on hand for such situations.

The CVS campaign includes content on its Web site, cvs.com, and five video clips and other material on its Facebook fan page, facebook.com/CVS.

In one video, an ExtraBucks coupon that a woman tosses away as she leaves a CVS store follows her in a “Jaws”-meets-Alfred-Hitchcock kind of thriller. In another video, not redeeming ExtraBucks coupons is likened to money-wasting mistakes like leaving lights on or water running.

“It’s very easy to save money through our ExtraCare program,” Melissa Studzinski, vice president for customer relationship management at CVS, said by e-mail.

“There are tens of millions of shoppers that realize this and take advantage,” she said, “yet there are still millions of customers who don’t.”

“We wanted to do something fun and irreverent to help draw attention to the savings that people are ‘trashing’ and drive more customers to redeem their rewards,” she added.

The campaign is being introduced in July because that is one of the quarterly periods the ExtraBucks coupons are printed on receipts. Another reason for the timing is that CVS is also redesigning the ExtraBucks coupons to use larger print and, the chain hopes, a more eye-catching design.

Early results are encouraging, Ms. Studzinski said, with an increase of 5 percent in the number of ExtraCare cardholders who are redeeming their rewards.

The campaign is a collaborative effort among the CVS employees who oversee ExtraCare and agencies that include Bravo, iCrossing, Matter Communications and Poptent.

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How VMware wants to be the OS for the cloud

VMware on Tuesday morning launched the latest version of its vSphere virtualization management software, as well as a suite of integrated products for managing cloud computing environments. There isn’t much new aside from the capabilities in vSphere 5, but VMware’s timing was ideal to take some of the wind out of rival Citrix’s sails after it announced the acquisition of Cloud.com this morning.

VMware CEO Paul Maritz took the stage at a press conference/web conference this morning to lay out the case for why vSphere 5 and the new Cloud Infrastructure Suite are needed. His pitch was similar to what he told Om at Structure 2011, which is that we’re moving beyond the PC era, which means new applications, new platforms and entirely new ways that employees will interact with IT. For that to happen, infrastructure management just “needs to disappear.”

Essentially, Maritz explained, harkening back to his Microsoft roots, the new cloud suite is like Office for building automated data centers. It’s composed of a collection of previously disparate VMware products now designed to be easily deployed atop vSphere environments. By that logic, vSphere would be the Windows operating system. Gary Orenstein nailed the VMware-Microsoft analogy in greater detail in a May post.

Maritz also made a strong case for deploying VMware-based applications in the public cloud, broadening the compnay from it’s private cloud roots. Maritz claimed that more than 2,000 service providers currently utilize vCloud to some degree in operating their cloud computing offerings.

VMware CTO Steve Herrod also took the stage to discuss the slew of new features within the various components of the suite designed to make vSphere more dynamic and reliable when operating across larger, geographically dispersed server pools similar to the public clouds that VMware and its private-cloud brethren seek to emulate. Among the highlights are highly powerful VMs running within vSphere, a app-store-like console for provisioning VMs, advanced disaster recovery methods, intelligent policy management, dynamic storage migration and advanced securtity capabilities. In all, there are hundreds of new features, which Herrod discusses in more detail on his blog.

VMware also is adjusting the licensing model for vSphere 5, focusing on pooled virtual memory allocations in stead of the number of physical hosts. Although this still presumably caps the amount of resources available, it does allow for cloud-like flexibility of moving resources where they’re needed. Software licensing has always been a sticking point around virtualization and cloud computing because vendors want those upfront fees, but users want the flexibility of adding new servers without necessarily adding more costs. Unless VMware were to go full pay-per-use and abandon license fees altogether, this might be among the happiest balances it could find.

This was not the groundbreaking event that VMware promised it would be, but the launch should please VMware customers looking for a higher-performance, more automated and generally cloudier VMware experience. Following on the heels of the Citrix-Cloud.com news, however, it looks like VMware will have to keep its foot on the innovation gas pedal to keep from finally feeling the pressure of an open source cloud movement led by XenServer, OpenStack and Red Hat’s KVM-based approach.

VMware has invested its future in a spate of application acquisitions and its Cloud Foundry platform as a service, but those are longer-term strategies still in their infancies. Infrastructure is what’s making money now, and although VMware has the lead in revenue and deployments, it doesn’t have all the momentum.

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