Dell appoints server chief in leadership shuffle

Dell has appointed a company veteran to run its server unit following the departure of an executive known for his strong opinions.

Ashley Gorakhpurwalla was promoted to vice president and general manager of Dell’s Server Solutions unit. He is responsible for planning, development and delivery of server hardware and products.

Gorakhpurwalla, who has been with Dell 14 years and was previously vice president for server engineering, takes over for Forrest Norrod, who left Dell Oct. 1. Under Norrod, the server unit grew into a US$10 billion business. He was also responsible for building Dell’s successful Data Center Services division, which Gorakhpurwalla also now heads.
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“Norrod recently notified Dell of his desire to take some time off and then pursue other opportunities,” said Erin Zehr, a spokeswoman for Dell, in an email.

Norrod established himself as a visionary in server technology. He was willing to experiment in new technologies and led Dell to be among the initial adopters of emerging ARM technology in servers. But he also felt it would take time for ARM to overcome software and adoption challenges.

Gorakhpurwalla will try to maneuver Dell through a server market in which buying trends are quickly changing. Companies such as Facebook and Google—which have mega data centers—are designing servers in-house and buying hardware directly at lower prices from manufacturers like Quanta and Inventec. That has impacted large server makers such as Hewlett-Packard, Dell and IBM, whose servers have less design flexibility.

Dell was the world’s third-largest server maker by revenue during the second quarter of this year, according to IDC. But Dell’s server business is threatened by smaller Chinese server makers such as Inspur, Huawei and Lenovo, which recently bought IBM’s faltering x86 server business for $2.1 billion.

Last month, Dell started shipping PowerEdge 13 servers with Intel’s latest Xeon E5-2600 v3 chips, code-named Grantley. Dell is still testing prototype servers based on ARM and no related product announcements have been made.

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10 (mostly) free Exchange admin tools

If you're in charge of an Exchange deployment of almost any size, there's something in here for you.

Troubleshooting does not have to be expensive, nor does daily administration of your mail servers and messaging environment. There are, in fact, a wealth of resources available for Exchange administrators to monitor health, administer users, migrate mailboxes to the cloud and even take care of old data that is stored insecurely and uncatalogued. But it's often difficult to know where to look for these software assists.

These tools are all aimed at Exchange 2010 Service Pack 1 and up, including Exchange Online and Office 365, although I have noted where previous versions of Exchange are supported by each of these tools.

Out of the 10 tools shown here, nine are free; all should be part of any Exchange administrator's toolbox.

The Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer
This is an indispensable companion and really helpful for any Exchange administrator. The ExRCA, as it is called, is a site Microsoft runs that functions as a remote client for Exchange, Outlook, the Autodiscover service and more. It's like having a free laptop stationed at a remote site that you can control right from your desk.

You can test if remote clients can connect to Exchange, if your certificates are configured correctly, if your autodiscover records are provisioned correctly, if mobile devices can connect over ActiveSync properly and much more. Each test runs quickly and provides detailed feedback about all of the diagnostics that are performed with each submission. Free.

SMTP logging
If you're having pesky mail flow issues and, in particular, you're having trouble sending or receiving messages outside of your internal mailboxes, then turn on SMTP logging. This lets Exchange basically print a transcript of everything that it sees over an SMTP connection session, and makes it a ton easier to figure out exactly what an error is. A best practice is to enable SMTP logging only when you are having trouble, as the logs are so detailed that in high-volume mail settings, your disks could fill up quickly. There are three levels available; for troubleshooting purposes, choose the highest, but don't forget to turn it off after you've finished. This tool is free.

Test-ExchangeServerHealth Script, by Paul Cunningham
Microsoft Exchange Server MVP Paul Cunningham has created a clever little PowerShell script that tests Exchange servers and database availability groups for errors and problems, and outputs that information into a nicely formatted HTML report that can be automatically scheduled to be e-mailed to you, perhaps every morning or weekly. It works with Exchange Server 2010 and can be easily customized to check for other issues specific to your own environment. Best of all, it's free if you become an "insider" on his website, which is also a no-cost proposition. Cunningham's website is a very useful resource for information about all versions of Exchange and Office 365. Free.

ManageEngine Free Exchange Health Monitor
This tool does many of the same things as Cunningham's script, but runs as a regular Windows application. It monitors various Exchange mailbox queues and the required Exchange system services, provides details for Outlook Web Access like page response and search time, and looks at your memory performance to see if paging is occurring. It also profiles usage details and you can set custom thresholds for various alerts; the tool will notify you when these thresholds are exceeded. It monitors both Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2013 servers. You can download it from the ManageEngine website, where you'll also find free tools to monitor Azure, SharePoint, Windows and more. Free.

ExFolders
If your deployment involves public folders of any kind, then the ExFolders tool straight from the horse's mouth at Microsoft should be in your toolbox. ExFolders works with permissions on public folders, including fixing them after other tools mess up those permissions, importing and exporting those permissions for migrations or other system maintenance, accessing other mailboxes and more. ExFolders can look at data on Exchange 2007 even though it runs on Exchange 2010. It is particularly handy for viewing deleted items in your public folder hierarchy as well as verifying that replication on the public folder hierarchy has taken place. Tip: Run it from the Exchange ServerV14BIN subfolder, or the tool will crash on you without any explanation. Free.

Microsoft Exchange Server Jetstress 2010 (32-bit) and Exchange 2013
Jetstress puts a real load on the input and output components of your Exchange systems and is a great way to verify that your systems are ready for production use. You can set the user count and the profile of the user activity that your deployment represents, and then Jetstress will simulate both database (mailbox) and log file loads so that you can be sure you have adequate horsepower, and headroom for growth. You can even run it on production servers during off-peak times to see where you are on the performance spectrum and what upgrades you might need to run. There's also a 64-bit version for Exchange 2010.

Steve Goodman's Exchange Environment Report Tool
Another Exchange MVP, Steve Goodman, has created a PowerShell script for health-related reports. This tool gives you information about Exchange servers' update levels, the number of mailboxes per version level, basic information about Office 365 mailboxes, a breakdown per site of the number of mailboxes and much more. The tool works with Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2013 servers and can also pull limited information in the aggregate from any Exchange 2007 servers you may have. If you have a hybrid Office 365-Exchange on-premises environment, this script is a better fit for you than the other free PowerShell script profiled earlier; otherwise, it essentially comes down to which tool creates the report format you find most appealing or useful. Free.

Microsoft Exchange PST Capture 2.0
The bane of many an Exchange administrator's existence are these pesky PST files, full of corporate email messages, potentially sensitive attachments and valuable legal information, all just lurking around storage areas on desktops, workstations, network shares, SANs and more, and all uncataloged. Microsoft released the free Exchange PST Capture tool, now in Version 2.0, to help discover these PSTs through agents that are installed on systems throughout your network. The agents talk to the PST Capture Central Service, which keeps a central log of all PST files the agents find and then imports those PSTs into Exchange on premises or Exchange Online or Office 365 mailboxes as you see fit. Free.

The Exchange Thumbnail Photo Manager
Score one in the user satisfaction column: Mike Pfeiffer has created a nice forms application, backed by a PowerShell script, that makes it super easy to upload into Active Directory the little thumbnail photos that users love. With this tool, you pick the mailbox, pick the photo and then click Upload. As long as users have the correct roles assigned, you can delegate this task to human resources or departmental administrative assistants and make quick work of keeping your Active Directory photos up to date. Highly recommended. Free.

MigrationWiz
These days, much of an Exchange administrator's job can be migrations -- from one platform to another or, more likely, migrations of mailbox data from on-premises systems into the cloud. MigrationWiz makes short work of any of these migrations. It works with basically every version of Exchange still in operation, Office 365, Google Apps, Lotus Domino, IMAP, POP and seemingly all things in between. The basic license at $9 does just a single pass of a mailbox, but the $11 premium license does a first pass of the mailbox and then later syncs to catch any mail that trickles in after a migration cutover point. Between $9 and $11 per mailbox, depending on license level.

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Are breaches inevitable?

Security managers have to do a lot more to stay a step ahead of determined hackers

Is there a reason that data breaches have been happening at a rapid clip lately? And is there more that we, as security managers, should be doing to make sure that our own companies don’t join the ranks of the breached?

Home Depot is the latest company to make headlines for a potentially big data breach, and it just might be the biggest one yet. The current record holder is Target, and we’ve more recently seen the company that owns grocery store chains Supervalu, Albertsons, Acme Markets, Jewel-Osco and Shaw’s compromised by hackers. J.P. Morgan and four other major banks appear to have fallen victim to security breaches. UPS stores were also hit by hackers, and several hundred Norwegian companies were compromised. These victims have joined the ranks of Neiman-Marcus, Michael’s, Sally Beauty, P.F. Chang’s and Goodwill. What’s going on?
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The motivation for attacks like these is usually financial. The attackers are stealing credit card and debit card numbers, along with personal information, which they then sell in underground markets. We don’t yet know whether this is the case with the banks that were hit; those attacks may have been politically motivated, or we may learn that fraudulent transactions were used to steal money. In any case, there seems to be a big jump in electronic data theft for profit. But the stolen information is only valuable for a few days, and its value diminishes rapidly by the hour. Some security researchers are saying that this loss of value is motivating today’s data thieves to move quickly. Another factor may be Microsoft’s termination of support for Windows XP, which could be prompting hackers to go for one last all-out heist to grab what they can while many systems are still vulnerable. Perhaps, knowing that all the vulnerabilities of Windows XP would soon vanish, our thieves had a fire sale.

But I suspect there is more to the story. Most big businesses use standard security procedures and technologies that have been around for years, if not decades. Many of these defenses have not kept up with current threats. Take antivirus, for example. Signature-based malware detection has long been ineffective against modern malware, yet most companies continue to rely on it as a key defense. We know from the details of some of the retail breaches that those who have implemented advanced heuristic malware detection have ignored the alarms set off by the point-of-sale malware (for reasons I cannot fathom). Patching will always be a game of catch-up, with the attackers having the upper hand. And password-based authentication will evidently be with us forever, much as I might rail against it. Attackers use all of these to get through their victims’ defenses.

The simple fact of the matter is that attackers will always have several vulnerabilities to choose from at any potential victim they want to target. And security managers, even those who are really good at their jobs, will never be able to close every single hole. And it only takes one.

So if traditional information security practices are not enough, what else can we do? I’ve been giving that question a lot of thought lately, and I think part of the answer is to evolve our security technologies, just as the attackers evolve their techniques. That heuristic behavior-based malware detection technology I keep talking about is pretty cool, but is it still cutting-edge? It’s been around for three or four years. Is there anything newer out there? And how can we choose the right technologies that are going to be effective against emerging threats but still stand the test of time so their manufacturers will be around three years from now?

There are some new products starting to go to market, and venture capitalists are funding a lot of new security technology. I think we should all keep a close eye on them. I’m beginning to believe that in the cutthroat rivalry between attacker and defender, the best technology wins. The only way we can keep one step ahead of today’s hackers is to take two steps forward and advance our defensive capabilities to the point where we can reliably repel, or at least detect, today’s data thieves.

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Ten tech products that died on arrival

Proof that no matter how much time, effort, and money you put into something, it may sink like a stone and stay at the bottom

ITworld's own Andy Patrizio has declared Windows 8 dead on arrival, a product so out-of-touch with its intended audience that that it was doomed from the start. The tech industry is surprisingly littered with such sad stories of failure, many from extremely successful companies. These products take years to develop, and sometimes the train is hard to divert, even when it becomes clear it's heading in the wrong direction. Many of these dead-on-arrival flops had high corporate hopes behind them; others were already giving off the stench of death, and were briefly released only to be mercifully put down in short order.

Apple Lisa
The first GUI-based PC available for mass purchase, the Lisa had a hefty price tag of nearly $10,000 and a powerful enemy in Steve Jobs, who had been forced off the Lisa project, which had been named after his daughter, a year before its 1983 release. As recounted by his biographer Walter Isaacson, Jobs told anyone who would listen that the new Apple project he had attached himself to, the Macintosh, was coming soon and would provide a GUI OS at a fraction of the price, all before the Lisa even hit stores. Although Lisa's OS contained features like protected memory that wouldn't hit the Mac until 2001, it never caught market traction and died by 1986.

IBM PCjr
If the Lisa died on arrival because of its looming successor, IBM's PCjr, the subject of a massive marketing campaign and pre-release buzz that declared it would blow up 1983's home computer market, was stillborn thanks to its older brother, the IBM PC, whose success had taken even IBM by surprise. While Big Blue hoped their reputation for quality would make people choose the PCjr over cheaper offerings from Atari and Commodore, most potential customers were looking for a stripped-down PC clone, not a computer that had a terrible keyboard and was incompatible with 40 percent of IBM software, including the all-important Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft Flight Simulator. The PCjr was a massive flop.

dBASE IV
Many users of enterprise software products are resigned to x.0 versions being buggy and are willing to wait for x.1 versions before writing them off completely, and in 1988 Ashton-Tate's dBASE database was in a strong enough position that it seemed capable of riding out the vitriolic press reaction to its dBASE 4.0 release. But instead of getting to work fixing the bugs, Ashton-Tate had already dedicated engineering resources to an entirely revamped product, leading to a user rebellion that targeted the company CEO personally. It took a year for the company to change course, by which point dBASE had lost nearly a third of its market share. Ashton-Tate was sold to Borland in 1991.

Microsoft Windows ME
Microsoft spent most of the '90s managing two separate OS lineages: Windows 9x, ultimately based on MS-DOS, and Windows NT, a business-focused OS that was considered too advanced for ordinary users. As the fin de siècle approached, Microsoft prepared Windows 2000, a successor to Windows NT 4 that would also serve as the general-purpose consumer OS. But less than a year before its release, Redmond admitted the consumer version wouldn't be ready in time and instead announced Windows Millenium Edition, a buggy, lackluster update to Windows 98, which PC World called "Mistake Edition." Windows XP, the true unification of the two codebases, came in 2001, and Windows ME was mercifully forgotten.

Segway
In 2001, the tech press was roiled by rumors of something, code-named "Ginger" or just "IT," being plotted by inventor Dean Kamen, who had previously built advanced all-terrain wheelchairs. Some of the more hyperbolic possibilities bandied about were that it was an super-efficient Stirling Engine, or perhaps a scooter built around such an engine. In fact, it (or "IT") turned out to be a scooter powered by ordinary electric motors, and while it has sold well enough into specific niche markets, the initial maniacally high hopes for it -- that people would "build cities around it" -- were so far from fruition from the moment of conception that we can call the dream of Ginger DOA.

Nokia N-Gage
In the early '00s, many gamers were carrying both a cell phone and a handheld gaming device like a Nintendo Gameboy. So Nokia, then a wildly successful developer of cutting-edge phones, reasoned: why shouldn't we make a device that combines both? The N-Gage, released in late 2003, had a dumb name, which many a tech device has survived, and a terrible design, which most do not; in order to use it as a phone, you had to hold it at an awkward angle that made it look like you were talking into a taco. The gaming controls were no great shakes either. Nokia shipped 400,000 to retailers, but fewer than 6,000 were actually purchased.

Apple G4 Cube
Is a computer with a spot in New York's Museum of Modern Art really a failure? It is if you were aiming to make money from it. Apple's G4 Cube, introduced in July of 2000, was touted as a groundbreaking aesthetic work, but it was also intended to serve as an intermediary product between the low-end iMac and high-end Power Mac. Unfortunately, Apple was also selling G4 towers with nearly identical specs for $200 less. That, plus the Cube's poor expansion options and overall weirdness, lead to anemic sales out of the gate and the decision to kill the product after only a year. By the time MoMA added one to its collection, it was genuinely a museum piece.

Oqo Model 2
The mid-'00s saw on onslaught of tiny Windows-compatible "ultra-mobile PCs." The briefly popular netbook evolved out of this category, but for sheer splash you couldn't beat the weird, PDA-sized Oqo Model 02, which Bill Gates held onstage at CES in 2007, and which somehow got dubbed the world's smallest "full-powered, full-featured personal computer" by the Guinness Book of Records. Oqo's Wikipedia page lists a litany of awards the Model 02 won (with a prominent [citation needed] tag), but did anyone actually use one in real life? The numbers were very small. The company was bankrupt less than two years later.

Microsoft Kin
In 2009, Microsoft was working on not one but two Windows CE-derived smartphone OSes to take on the iPhone and Android. One, Windows Phone 7, established a new ecosystem that's carved out a niche in the market. The other, Microsoft Kin, was an epic disaster. Created by the group that had built the Danger Hiptop, the Kin was supposed to be a social media-focused device for twentysomethings. But its social hub only refreshed every 15 minutes, you couldn't use it to upload pictures to Twitter, and it lacked an app store. Nobody bought it. Less than two months after it was unveiled, Microsoft killed it and cut its losses.

BlackBerry PlayBook
In 2011, RIM was in trouble, and BlackBerry had been eclipsed by Apple and Android. In a Hail Mary move, the company bought itself a new and well-regarded operating system, QNX, and opted to first build it into a tablet device that would take on the iPad. While the tech specs were good, the execution was awful: the PlayBook lacked the ability to send or receive email and BlackBerry messages (one of the few remaining BlackBerry-unique features on the market) without a connection to a separate phone, and it introduced an bewildering set of new development environments that alienated longstanding BlackBerry app devs. Sales were much, much lower than expected, which contributed to the company's current sad state.

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Internet of Overwhelming Things

As the era of Internet of Things (IoT) dawned, the fridge got hacked. Well, maybe not.

In early 2014, as many media outlets such as NPR reported, security services vendor Proofpoint claimed to have detected the first IoT-based cyber attack involving “more than 750,000 malicious email communications coming from more than 100,000 everyday consumer gadgets such as home-networking routers, connected multi-media centers, televisions and at least one refrigerator that had been compromised and used as a platform to launch attacks.”

Subsequently, Symantec rebutted that initial report, instead blaming that old bugaboo of infected Windows-based computers. Nonetheless Symantec said it really had “uncovered one of the first and most interesting IoT threats, Linux.Darlloz, which infects Linux-based IoT devices such as routers, cameras, and entertainment systems.”

Whether it’s your fridge or your DVR is probably irrelevant. These reports should serve as an indicator of how rapidly the network security landscape is changing, and spark some questions about the potential for mischief in this new era.

Market research firm IDC predicts we’ll see 212 billion of these thingies deployed by the end of 2020. That makes for one heck of a malevolent botnet, opening doors to disrupt Internet connected devices at home or perhaps even in not-so-secret nuclear weapons facilities. Or, maybe just provide the means to prank a colleague with the exploding desk lamp trick.

Let’s be real, none of us (well, almost none) want to tie into everything over the Internet, including the kitchen sink. But there’s no question the growing number of connected devices is going to bring a massive increase in traffic volumes. And that should get you thinking about this: How prepared is your networking infrastructure?

Without having the right network foundation in place, this brave new world could prove to be the Internet of Overwhelming Things (IoOT), leading to greater inefficiencies and growing security woes. To avoid this, data center networks must be more flexible, scalable, and efficient.

Many data centers have taken the first needed step, which is in virtualizing servers and applications, but often still rely on legacy networks that weren’t designed for today’s growing workloads. They simply can’t keep up with demands in an era of social media, mobile, cloud and big data.

Smart, flexible, agile, scalable…not exactly the words I’d use to describe legacy networks. When the rest of the computing world is moving toward consumption-based, anything-as-a-service computing and virtualization, why the heck are these old networks holding sway?

Undoubtedly part of the reason is too many data centers are locked in to single vendor solutions. No vendor in that situation is going to be eager to replace expensive, proprietary hardware solutions unless it’s with even more expensive, proprietary hardware solutions. The trick lies in figuring out how to migrate from that world of yesterday, to a future of open architecture, software-defined networking.

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15 great apps for Android Wear

All Android Wear apps are not created equal. Here are 15 standout selections that actually add value to the smartwatch form.

Expand your Android Wear horizons
Google's Android Wear platform is pretty powerful out of the box -- but with the right set of apps, it can be made even more useful.

Any Android app can actually interact with a Wear watch via its regular notifications. Certain apps, however, take things a step further with advanced features and special interfaces.

Of course, just because an app works on a watch doesn't mean it's worth using. Wear apps shouldn't merely be watered-down versions of what we have on our phones; they should provide meaningful value specific to the smartwatch form -- in a way that actually makes sense for a wrist-based device.

These 15 apps accomplish that, and they're well worth giving a whirl.

Wear Unlock for Android Wear
This app is one you'll probably never open once you have set it up -- but its presence will benefit you almost every day.

Wear Unlock ($1.99) turns your smartwatch into a wireless key for your phone: Whenever your watch is present and paired, your phone won't prompt you for a PIN or password. When your watch isn't actively connected, your phone will automatically lock itself and enable a security prompt.

That type of function is available natively in the Moto X -- and will be built into Android itself starting with this fall's "L" release -- but Wear Unlock makes it work with any phone today.

Wear Unlock for Android Wear
This app is one you'll probably never open once you have set it up -- but its presence will benefit you almost every day.

Wear Unlock ($1.99) turns your smartwatch into a wireless key for your phone: Whenever your watch is present and paired, your phone won't prompt you for a PIN or password. When your watch isn't actively connected, your phone will automatically lock itself and enable a security prompt.

That type of function is available natively in the Moto X -- and will be built into Android itself starting with this fall's "L" release -- but Wear Unlock makes it work with any phone today.

Wear Aware - Phone Finder
Your Android Wear watch is always on your wrist -- and that means it can help make sure you never leave your phone behind.

Wear Aware (free) runs in the background on both devices and buzzes your watch anytime your phone moves out of range. That way, if you set the phone down and walk out of a room, you'll figure it out before you get too far.

The app also allows you to manually page your phone from your watch so you can easily find it when it's out of sight (like those times when it's magically hidden between your couch cushions).

IFTTT
No single Android Wear app offers more possibilities than IFTTT. The app -- which stands for "If This, Then That" -- connects to the cloud-based service of the same name.

IFTTT (free) allows you to configure and run all sorts of recipes that bring together different types of Web-driven actions. You can use it to set the temperature on a Nest thermostat, for example, or to activate an appliance connected to a Belkin WeMo switch. You can even use it to trigger a fake call to your phone, if you're ever desperate for an excuse.

Anyone can create and contribute new recipes, and the list of available options grows with each passing week.

PixtoCam for Android Wear
Google's native Android Camera app has built-in Wear functionality: When you open the app on your phone, a card appears on your watch with a simple button to activate the shutter remotely.

Handy, sure, but that's just scratching the surface of the ways Wear can interact with your phone's camera. An app called PixtoCam ($1.99) actually lets you see through your phone's lens anytime you open it on your watch. You can remotely snap photos or capture videos and even control the camera's zoom and flash from your wrist.

The app's interface isn't great -- but if you're willing to put up with that, its functionality is fantastic.

Allthecooks Recipes
Allthecooks (free) is a prime example of how an app can adapt sensibly to the smartwatch form. The way it works is simple: You open the app on your phone and find a recipe you want to attempt.

Once you make a selection, the recipe automatically shows up as a card on your watch. You tap it to bring up step-by-step instructions formatted to fit the small screen. Each step is on a single card, and you swipe horizontally to move from one to the next.

That keeps your hands free while you're cooking and allows you to glance down at your wrist for all the info you need -- and that, my friends, is what a smartwatch is all about.

RunKeeper - GPS Track Run Walk
RunKeeper (free) makes excellent use of the smartwatch form. The app is designed to track your walks, runs and bike rides while providing detailed ongoing info about your progress.

Anytime you start a new activity, RunKeeper places a card on your watch that lets you view your current time, total miles traveled and miles per minute. You can pause or stop the activity by using on-screen buttons or by tapping a microphone icon and saying "pause" or "stop." When you're finished, RunKeeper gives you a summary card that shows all of your stats, including totals for the aforementioned measurements as well as the number of calories burned.

An optional $9.99/month subscription offers features like long-term statistics.

Golfshot: Golf GPS
Golfshot (free) turns your Android Wear watch into an intelligent guide for all your golfing adventures. You simply tell the app what course you're playing on and it puts pertinent info on your watch's display as you go.

Cards from Golfshot show you the distance from your current location to each hole, along with stats like the par and handicap for every stop along the way. You can also get the distance to the course's hazards in order to keep track of upcoming obstacles.

An optional $4.99/month subscription enables enhanced features like 3D flyovers and personalized recommendations.

EchoWear Song Search
Google's ability to identify a song on demand is an awesome feature for music fans -- and with a screen on your wrist, it's easier than ever to access that information.

Install EchoWear Song Search (free) on your Android Wear device and the next time a song that you don't know is playing, tell your watch to "Start Echo Search." The app will listen to the tune through the watch's mic and then present you with a card showing the artist and track title.

Wear Mini Launcher
In theory, Android Wear is designed to revolve around voice commands and contextual information -- but in reality, there are also times you'll want to manually open an app or adjust your watch's settings. The current version of the software doesn't make those tasks easy.

That's where a utility called Wear Mini Launcher comes in handy. Wear Mini Launcher (free) adds a hidden drawer that appears anytime you swipe over from the left side of your watch's home screen. The drawer gives you quick access to all of your apps as well as tools to adjust the watch's brightness, view the battery level of your watch and your phone, and remotely toggle things like your phone's Wi-Fi and volume settings.

@here for Android Wear
Ever find yourself in an unfamiliar area and attempting to tell someone where you are? An app called @here (free) can help.

The app does all the work for you: When you're in a new location, @here will place a card on your Wear watch showing your current address on a map. You can swipe sideways to see the name of the neighborhood and to get a closer view of the streets around you.

If you'd rather not get location cards automatically, you can also opt to have @here appear only when you explicitly ask for its assistance.

Emergency Alert for Wear
Emergency Alert (free) is an app you probably won't need often -- but one that might be worth keeping around just in case.

The app allows you to set a predefined emergency contact and message. You can then speak the command "Start Emergency Alert" into your watch to have the message delivered via SMS along with an interactive map of your location. (The app does require a single on-screen tap for confirmation to make sure you don't trigger an alert by mistake.)

Of course, the app doesn't have to be used only for emergencies; you could also employ it as a tool for quickly sharing your location with a specific friend or loved one to make it easier to meet.

Lyft
Next time you need a ride, try speaking into your wrist. Lyft (free) lets you request a pickup via Wear with an easy-to-remember voice command: "Call me a car."

Once a driver's en route, the app delivers card-based updates to your watch that show you the vehicle's estimated arrival time along with the option to cancel.

Lyft isn't available everywhere, but if you're in one of the places where the service is provided, its Wear integration delivers a top-notch -- and thus far unmatched -- experience.

Fly Delta
Flying the friendly skies? Grab the official Fly Delta app (free), and you'll automatically get useful info on your Android Wear watch when you need it.

Delta's app delivers nicely formatted updates about your itinerary along with mobile boarding pass barcodes so you never have to whip out your phone or physical documents. Its updates start appearing as cards as soon as you're checked in.

(The American Airlines app (free) also provides similar functionality.)

1Weather: Widget Forecast Radar
Android Wear has its own native weather cards, but you can step things up a notch with the aid of 1Weather (free -- an optional $1.99 upgrade removes ads).

The app's main card shows you the current conditions for your area or any other area you select. Swiping over once gives you a glimpse at what's ahead for the rest of the day -- broken down into segments like "morning," "noon," "evening" and "night" -- while swiping over a second time lets you look ahead at the four-day forecast.

Baby Time: Android Wear Lock
If you spend any time holding a small child, this app might be just what the doctor ordered.

Baby Time (free) offers an easy way to baby-proof your Android Wear watch: Just issue the voice command "Run Baby Time," and your screen will go dim and stop responding to taps and basic swipes. To get the watch back in its normal mode, you'll have to swipe up twice and then down twice -- something even the most advanced infant is unlikely to do.

JR Raphael is a Computerworld contributing editor and the author of the Android Power blog. For more Android tips and insights, follow him on Google+ or Twitter.

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Microsoft to lay off 18,000 in next year

Microsoft announced Thursday morning that it will cut its workforce by up to 18,000 jobs, or 14 percent, in the next year, as part of a broad effort to streamline the company in the wake of its acquisition of phone-maker Nokia.

A letter to employees from CEO Satya Nadella, released by the company, said that its “work toward synergies and strategic alignment on Nokia Devices and Services is expected to account for about 12,500 jobs, comprising both professional and factory workers. We are moving now to start reducing the first 13,000 positions, and the vast majority of employees whose jobs will be eliminated will be notified over the next six months.”

Nadella’s letter said that the company will add jobs in other areas.

In it, he promised further information about where the company will focus investment in innovation during a public conference call to discuss earnings on July 22, and invited staff to join a monthly internal question and answer session with him on Friday to find out more.

Senior leadership team members will discuss the effect of the cuts on their organizations later Thursday, he said. Staff laid off as a result of the process will be offered severance pay and, in many places, help in finding a new job, he said.

Beyond integration of the Nokia handset business, Nadella said the job cuts would focus on work simplification, eliminating layers of management and changing what the company expects from each of the disciplines involved in engineering activities. These changes are intended to accelerate the flow of information and decision making, he wrote.

Nadella also unveiled a few details of his plans for the Nokia phone portfolio.

Microsoft will “focus on breakthrough innovation that expresses and enlivens Microsoft’s digital work and digital life experiences” to win in the higher price tiers, he said.

Most intriguingly, the low-end, Android-based Nokia X phones, introduced as last-gasp strategy by Nokia before it sold the handset business to Microsoft, will survive—but not as Android phones. Instead, said Nadella, “We plan to shift select Nokia X product designs to become Lumia products running Windows.” Nokia had laid the groundwork for that before the sale, building its own apps and a user interface for Android that resembled Windows Phone.

In a separate letter to staff, Microsoft Devices Group head Stephen Elop said the company would continue to sell the Android devices in some countries, depending on local conditions.

He also detailed where some of the job cuts would fall. Engineering work on mobile phones will continue at two locations in Finland, Salo for high-end Lumia devices and Tampere for affordable devices, but will be ramped down in Beijing, San Diego and in Oulo, Finland. Phone manufacturing will continue in Hanoi, and to a lesser extend in Beijing and Dongguan. He made no mention of former Nokia manufacturing operations in India.

There will be limited change for the teams working on Surface devices and Xbox hardware as these had already been restructured earlier in the year, Elop said.

As of June 5, Microsoft had 127,104 employees, 61,313 of them in the U.S., according to its website. The planned job cuts could affect around 14 percent of the workforce.

Peter Sayer contributed to this article.

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