In Russian Social Media, Glimpse of Students Accused of Hiding Boston Evidence

One of those charged, Dias Kadyrbayev, left, with the surviving suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, in a photo from the social network VK.

This undated photo found on the VK page of Dias Kadyrbayev shows Kadyrbayev, right, with the Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, left, at an unknown location.

On April 18, the day before Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured as a suspect in the bombings at the Boston Marathon, a friend from the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth posted photos of them together on VKontakte, the Russian social network.

The photos, posted under the account of Dias Kadyrbayev, a 19-year-old Kazakh, offer a glimpse into the relationship between Mr. Kadyrbayev and Mr. Tsarnaev, which began after they enrolled as freshmen in the fall of 2011.

They grew closer last year, the authorities said, and traveled to New York City with another friend â€" Azamat Tazhayakov, 19, who is also a citizen of Kazakhstan and a student at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.

They posed with a group of friends in Times Square. Other photos posted on Mr. Kadyrbayev’s account show them sharing a meal and standing outside in front of a small fire.

Later on April 18, at 8:43 p.m., according to a federal complaint, Mr. Kadyrbayev sent Mr. Tsarnaev a text message after seeing the photos circulated by the F.B.I. of two men suspected in the bombings, which killed three people and injured more than 250 others.

Two of the men charged, Azamat Tazhayakov and Dias Kadyrbayev, with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in Times Square, in a photo from the social network VK.

In a text message, he told Mr. Tsarnaev that he looked like one of the suspects on television. According to the complaint, Mr. Tsarnaev’s return text messages included several things that Mr. Kadyrbayev interpreted as jokes, like “LOL,” “you better not text me” and “come to my room and take whatever you want!”

Not long after that exchange of text messages, the complaint said, Mr. Kadyrbayev and Mr. Tazhayakov, accompanied by a former high school classmate of Mr. Tsarnaev’s from Cambridge, Mass., took a backpack, fireworks and a laptop computer from Mr. Tsarnaev’s dorm room.

As my colleagues report, the two Kazakh students were taken into custody for possible student visa violations when police questioned them shortly after Mr. Tsarnaev was captured on April 19. (Mr. Tsarnaev’s brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, who is also suspected in the bombings, died after a gunfight with police.)

On Wednesday, Mr. Kadyrbayev and Mr. Tazhayakov were arrested on federal charges of conspiring to obstruct justice and destroy evidence.

Lawyers for both men, who appeared in court Wednesday afternoon and waived bail, said that their clients had not known that Mr. Tsarnaev was involved in the bombings and that they were cooperating fully with investigators.

A third person, Robel Phillipos, 19, who had attended high school with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in Cambridge and briefly attended the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, was also arrested on Wednesday on charges of lying to investigators, the complaint said. He is accused of going to Mr. Tsarnaev’s dorm room with the two other suspects when the items were removed and then lying about it multiple times when questioned by investigators.

Mr. Phillipos, who lives with his mother in Cambridge, and Mr. Tsarnaev graduated in 2011 from Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. According to The Cambridge Chronicle, the local newspaper, he was also a member of a student leadership group in 2009.

Cambridge resident Robel Phillipos in 2009. He was a member of the Kids’ Council Youth Involvement Subcommittee twitter.com/cambridgechron…

â€" Cambridge Chronicle (@cambridgechron) May 1, 2013

Mr. Phillipos does not appear to have an active Facebook account, but he does have a YouTube channel under his name. In one video, in what appears to be an assignment for the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, he discusses the founder of the F. W. Woolworth Company, whose descendants provided financing for the school’s Charlton College of Business.

Robel Phillipos, 19, was charged with lying to federal law enforcement officials during an investigation of the bombing.

The complaint, combined with postings on social media accounts, offers a glimpse into the lives of the two young men from Kazakhstan and how they came to know Mr. Tsarnaev on the UMass Dartmouth in southern Massachusetts.

Details in the complaint suggest that Mr. Tsarnaev may have been closer to Mr. Kadyrbayev, who is accused of throwing Mr. Tsarnaev’s backpack into the trash Thursday evening after it was retrieved from the dorm room. According to the complaint, he had visited Mr. Tsarnaev at his family’s home in Cambridge over the last year, and Mr. Tsarnaev had spent a lot of time at Mr. Kadyrbayev’s and Mr. Tazhayakov’s off-campus apartment in New Bedford.

On his Russian social network page, Mr. Kadyrbayev claimed he was an engineering major at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was not. Nor, in fact, was he enrolled full-time at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth this spring, officials say.

In his profile picture, Mr. Kadyrbayev is wearing a mask of the Iron Man movie character. On his profile, he says that he is from Almaty, Kazakhstan, and that he attended a boarding high school. He lists the school as the Zhautykov Specialized Physics-Mathematics Boarding School for Talented Children of the Republic [of Kazakhstan].

He describes his world view as “Islam” and his personal priority as “improving the world.” What is important in others, he says, is “kindness and honesty.” He notes that he holds negative views on smoking and alcohol.

The Facebook page under Mr. Kadyrbayev’s name shows photos of a trip to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., but limited posts.

All four men â€" Mr. Tsarnaev, Mr. Kadyrbayev, Mr. Tazhayakov and Mr. Phillipos â€" were enrolled at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth in the fall of 2011. Mr. Phillipos dropped out and returned to Cambridge. Mr. Tazhayakov remains a student but has been suspended until the charges against him are resolved.

On the Facebook page under Mr. Tazhayakov’s name, his hometown is given as Atyrau, Kazakhstan, and he says he is a graduate of the Miras International School of Astana.

His VKontakte page includes more photos, including some that appear to be from a trip to New York City. Mr. Tsarnaev, the bombing suspect, does not appear to be in any of these photos, which show a visit to Statue of Liberty, shots of the city’s skyline and another photo near Times Square. In this photo, Mr. Tazhayakov is standing outside Port Authority Bus Terminal with the New York Times building in the background.

Azamat Tazhayakov in front of the New York Times building near Times Square, in a photo from the social network VK.

Ilya Mouzykantskii and Michael Schwirtz contributed reporting.

In Russian Social Media, Glimpse of Students Accused of Hiding Boston Evidence

One of those charged, Dias Kadyrbayev, left, with the surviving suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, in a photo from the social network VK.

This undated photo found on the VK page of Dias Kadyrbayev shows Kadyrbayev, right, with the Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, left, at an unknown location.

On April 18, the day before Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured as a suspect in the bombings at the Boston Marathon, a friend from the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth posted photos of them together on VKontakte, the Russian social network.

The photos, posted under the account of Dias Kadyrbayev, a 19-year-old Kazakh, offer a glimpse into the relationship between Mr. Kadyrbayev and Mr. Tsarnaev, which began after they enrolled as freshmen in the fall of 2011.

They grew closer last year, the authorities said, and traveled to New York City with another friend â€" Azamat Tazhayakov, 19, who is also a citizen of Kazakhstan and a student at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.

They posed with a group of friends in Times Square. Other photos posted on Mr. Kadyrbayev’s account show them sharing a meal and standing outside in front of a small fire.

Later on April 18, at 8:43 p.m., according to a federal complaint, Mr. Kadyrbayev sent Mr. Tsarnaev a text message after seeing the photos circulated by the F.B.I. of two men suspected in the bombings, which killed three people and injured more than 250 others.

Two of the men charged, Azamat Tazhayakov and Dias Kadyrbayev, with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in Times Square, in a photo from the social network VK.

In a text message, he told Mr. Tsarnaev that he looked like one of the suspects on television. According to the complaint, Mr. Tsarnaev’s return text messages included several things that Mr. Kadyrbayev interpreted as jokes, like “LOL,” “you better not text me” and “come to my room and take whatever you want!”

Not long after that exchange of text messages, the complaint said, Mr. Kadyrbayev and Mr. Tazhayakov, accompanied by a former high school classmate of Mr. Tsarnaev’s from Cambridge, Mass., took a backpack, fireworks and a laptop computer from Mr. Tsarnaev’s dorm room.

As my colleagues report, the two Kazakh students were taken into custody for possible student visa violations when police questioned them shortly after Mr. Tsarnaev was captured on April 19. (Mr. Tsarnaev’s brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, who is also suspected in the bombings, died after a gunfight with police.)

On Wednesday, Mr. Kadyrbayev and Mr. Tazhayakov were arrested on federal charges of conspiring to obstruct justice and destroy evidence.

Lawyers for both men, who appeared in court Wednesday afternoon and waived bail, said that their clients had not known that Mr. Tsarnaev was involved in the bombings and that they were cooperating fully with investigators.

A third person, Robel Phillipos, 19, who had attended high school with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in Cambridge and briefly attended the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, was also arrested on Wednesday on charges of lying to investigators, the complaint said. He is accused of going to Mr. Tsarnaev’s dorm room with the two other suspects when the items were removed and then lying about it multiple times when questioned by investigators.

Mr. Phillipos, who lives with his mother in Cambridge, and Mr. Tsarnaev graduated in 2011 from Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. According to The Cambridge Chronicle, the local newspaper, he was also a member of a student leadership group in 2009.

Cambridge resident Robel Phillipos in 2009. He was a member of the Kids’ Council Youth Involvement Subcommittee twitter.com/cambridgechron…

â€" Cambridge Chronicle (@cambridgechron) May 1, 2013

Mr. Phillipos does not appear to have an active Facebook account, but he does have a YouTube channel under his name. In one video, in what appears to be an assignment for the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, he discusses the founder of the F. W. Woolworth Company, whose descendants provided financing for the school’s Charlton College of Business.

Robel Phillipos, 19, was charged with lying to federal law enforcement officials during an investigation of the bombing.

The complaint, combined with postings on social media accounts, offers a glimpse into the lives of the two young men from Kazakhstan and how they came to know Mr. Tsarnaev on the UMass Dartmouth in southern Massachusetts.

Details in the complaint suggest that Mr. Tsarnaev may have been closer to Mr. Kadyrbayev, who is accused of throwing Mr. Tsarnaev’s backpack into the trash Thursday evening after it was retrieved from the dorm room. According to the complaint, he had visited Mr. Tsarnaev at his family’s home in Cambridge over the last year, and Mr. Tsarnaev had spent a lot of time at Mr. Kadyrbayev’s and Mr. Tazhayakov’s off-campus apartment in New Bedford.

On his Russian social network page, Mr. Kadyrbayev claimed he was an engineering major at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was not. Nor, in fact, was he enrolled full-time at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth this spring, officials say.

In his profile picture, Mr. Kadyrbayev is wearing a mask of the Iron Man movie character. On his profile, he says that he is from Almaty, Kazakhstan, and that he attended a boarding high school. He lists the school as the Zhautykov Specialized Physics-Mathematics Boarding School for Talented Children of the Republic [of Kazakhstan].

He describes his world view as “Islam” and his personal priority as “improving the world.” What is important in others, he says, is “kindness and honesty.” He notes that he holds negative views on smoking and alcohol.

The Facebook page under Mr. Kadyrbayev’s name shows photos of a trip to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., but limited posts.

All four men â€" Mr. Tsarnaev, Mr. Kadyrbayev, Mr. Tazhayakov and Mr. Phillipos â€" were enrolled at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth in the fall of 2011. Mr. Phillipos dropped out and returned to Cambridge. Mr. Tazhayakov remains a student but has been suspended until the charges against him are resolved.

On the Facebook page under Mr. Tazhayakov’s name, his hometown is given as Atyrau, Kazakhstan, and he says he is a graduate of the Miras International School of Astana.

His VKontakte page includes more photos, including some that appear to be from a trip to New York City. Mr. Tsarnaev, the bombing suspect, does not appear to be in any of these photos, which show a visit to Statue of Liberty, shots of the city’s skyline and another photo near Times Square. In this photo, Mr. Tazhayakov is standing outside Port Authority Bus Terminal with the New York Times building in the background.

Azamat Tazhayakov in front of the New York Times building near Times Square, in a photo from the social network VK.

Ilya Mouzykantskii and Michael Schwirtz contributed reporting.

Video of Turkmen Leader’s Spectacular Fall Foils Effort to Cover Up Accident

Video recorded in Turkmenistan on Sunday showed the nation’s president winning a horse race and then tumbling to the track, recorded by a spectator was obtained by Eurasianet.

The leader of Turkmenistan learned this week just how difficult it can be to maintain a cult of personality in the Internet era, when the official account of his dashing triumph in a horse race on Sunday was undermined by video posted on foreign Web sites, showing what state television had failed to mention â€" the president’s spectacular fall to the track seconds after his horse crossed the finish line.

Although Turkmen security agents reportedly conducted a very thorough search for footage of President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov’s tumble before spectators were allowed to leave the race track on the outskirts of the Central Asian republic’s capital, Ashgabat, video of the accident, recorded from two angles, made it out of the grounds and onto the Web.

Images of the 55-year-old president’s wild ride and hard fall were posted online by both EurasiaNet, which obtained them from a spectator who wished to remain anonymous, and featured in a news report from Turkey’s Fox News.

The Fox Türkiye report, with closer images of the fall that appeared to show the president might have been knocked unconscious, mentioned that the Turkish minister for agriculture and animal husbandry was among the many foreign dignitaries invited to the weekend’s horse festival in Ashgabat, which might explain how the broadcaster managed to get its footage past security.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the American-financed broadcaster, reported that the president was riding one of “Turkmenistan’s prized Akhal-Teke horses” named Berkarar, the Turkmen word for Mighty. One witness, Clara de Vos van Steenwijk, who is the president of Luxembourg Akhal-Teke Association, told the broadcaster that as the president crossed the finish line “he looked at the crowd with a big smile and, about 20 meters further, the horse stumbled probably on a soft spot in the sand and went down on his knees and, of course, stopped at that point. And so the president who was going quite fast moved on and fell in the sand.”

As the track announcer simply said, “Our beloved president was able to finish the race in first place,” Ms. Steenwijk said, “of course it was a big shock for the public. There were thousands of people there and you could hear a pin drop.”

After the president’s limp body was bundled off the track, EurasiaNet reported, “security forces fanned out into the crowd and forced attendees with cameras inside the stadium. The doors were locked and anyone with video or photos of Berdymukhamedov’s fall was forced to delete them. University-age volunteers also kept an eye on attendees in an attempt to prevent anyone from hiding camera memory cards.”

After a long, uncomfortable wait for the spectators, Mr. Berdymukhammedov briefly reappeared, waving to the crowd, The Associated Press reported.

None of this drama made it into the edited highlights of the race broadcast on Turkmen state television, later posted online by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Turkmen Service.

Shortly after Mr. Berdymukhammedov, a dentist by training, was re-elected last year with 97 percent of the vote, he asked if he could take part in the first race on a new automotive track in the Turkmen capital, surprising organizers with his last-minute request. As The A.P. reported at the time, the president “promptly proceeded to record the best time in the time-trial challenge.”

Robert Mackey also remixes the news on Twitter @robertmackey.

Video of Turkmen Leader’s Spectacular Fall Foils Effort to Cover Up Accident

Video recorded in Turkmenistan on Sunday showed the nation’s president winning a horse race and then tumbling to the track, recorded by a spectator was obtained by Eurasianet.

The leader of Turkmenistan learned this week just how difficult it can be to maintain a cult of personality in the Internet era, when the official account of his dashing triumph in a horse race on Sunday was undermined by video posted on foreign Web sites, showing what state television had failed to mention â€" the president’s spectacular fall to the track seconds after his horse crossed the finish line.

Although Turkmen security agents reportedly conducted a very thorough search for footage of President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov’s tumble before spectators were allowed to leave the race track on the outskirts of the Central Asian republic’s capital, Ashgabat, video of the accident, recorded from two angles, made it out of the grounds and onto the Web.

Images of the 55-year-old president’s wild ride and hard fall were posted online by both EurasiaNet, which obtained them from a spectator who wished to remain anonymous, and featured in a news report from Turkey’s Fox News.

The Fox Türkiye report, with closer images of the fall that appeared to show the president might have been knocked unconscious, mentioned that the Turkish minister for agriculture and animal husbandry was among the many foreign dignitaries invited to the weekend’s horse festival in Ashgabat, which might explain how the broadcaster managed to get its footage past security.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the American-financed broadcaster, reported that the president was riding one of “Turkmenistan’s prized Akhal-Teke horses” named Berkarar, the Turkmen word for Mighty. One witness, Clara de Vos van Steenwijk, who is the president of Luxembourg Akhal-Teke Association, told the broadcaster that as the president crossed the finish line “he looked at the crowd with a big smile and, about 20 meters further, the horse stumbled probably on a soft spot in the sand and went down on his knees and, of course, stopped at that point. And so the president who was going quite fast moved on and fell in the sand.”

As the track announcer simply said, “Our beloved president was able to finish the race in first place,” Ms. Steenwijk said, “of course it was a big shock for the public. There were thousands of people there and you could hear a pin drop.”

After the president’s limp body was bundled off the track, EurasiaNet reported, “security forces fanned out into the crowd and forced attendees with cameras inside the stadium. The doors were locked and anyone with video or photos of Berdymukhamedov’s fall was forced to delete them. University-age volunteers also kept an eye on attendees in an attempt to prevent anyone from hiding camera memory cards.”

After a long, uncomfortable wait for the spectators, Mr. Berdymukhammedov briefly reappeared, waving to the crowd, The Associated Press reported.

None of this drama made it into the edited highlights of the race broadcast on Turkmen state television, later posted online by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Turkmen Service.

Shortly after Mr. Berdymukhammedov, a dentist by training, was re-elected last year with 97 percent of the vote, he asked if he could take part in the first race on a new automotive track in the Turkmen capital, surprising organizers with his last-minute request. As The A.P. reported at the time, the president “promptly proceeded to record the best time in the time-trial challenge.”

Robert Mackey also remixes the news on Twitter @robertmackey.

Today’s Scuttlebot: Hacking for Murder, and Talent Shortage Doubts

The technology reporters and editors of The New York Times scour the Web for important and peculiar items. For Monday, selections include revisiting Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobility, a look at how a move to digital games could eventually end the used game market and LinkedIn streamlining and accelerating the way it updates code on its site.

Daily Report: Acquisitions Shrink the Number of Travel Search Sites

The online travel search business is consolidating, as two of the biggest online travel agencies, Priceline.com and Expedia.com, buy smaller search engines, Harriet Edleson reports in The New York Times.

Court Dismisses Craigslist Suit Against Competitors

Craigslist does not have exclusive licenses to the postings on its classified advertising Web site, a federal court ruled on Tuesday.

Craigslist alleged last year that the listings Web sites PadMapper and Lovely, as well as 3Taps, a company that collects public data and organizes it for the use of developers, were infringing on its copyright and trademark. Craigslist also made a number of other piracy-related claims against the trio and asked the court to shut them down.

But Judge Charles R. Breyer of United States District Court for the Northern District of California dismissed the charges on Tuesday. Craigslist’s terms of use do not give it an exclusive license to customers’ data, he said in his ruling, and without an exclusive license, the company cannot sue for infringement.

In a blog post on the 3Taps Web site, Greg Kidd, the company’s chief executive, wrote that the ruling would allow new start-ups to create search options for customers, and that developers would be able to “confidently continue to focus on innovation rather than litigation.”

The legal battle isn’t over, however. The court declined to dismiss an additional case by Craigslist that accuses 3Taps of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by siphoning listings from search engines. Craigslist did not respond to a request for comment.

As I wrote in a column last year, Craigslist has long promoted itself as a listings company that hopes to make the world a better place. But it uses tough legal tactics to guard its business. Dozens of small Web sites that have used Craigslist data have received cease-and-desist letters from Perkins Coie, a corporate law firm that frequently represents Craigslist.

The legal battle with PadMapper, Lovely and 3Taps is a rare example of smaller companies holding their ground against Craigslist. In the past, the listings giant has greeted start-ups with intimidating legal threats, and the tactics often worked. Craigslist’s lawyers have managed to shut down sites like Craig’s Little Buddy, which allowed users to search multiple Craigslist cities at once; Craigsly, which helped people set up e-mail alerts for a certain type of listing; and Ziink Craigslist Helper, which offered a free browser plug-in that made navigating listings easier.

But Craigslist has not always gotten its way. In September, 3Taps fought back and filed an antitrust claim accusing Craigslist of anticompetitive business practices. The claim is expected to go to trial later this year.

In Tuesday’s ruling, the court also upheld a controversial but temporary addition to Craigslist’s terms of service. The language, which was removed after three weeks, said Craigslist owned any facts or descriptions in ads posted on the company’s Web site. Post the same ad somewhere else and you could be accused of stealing content from Craigslist, even if you were the person who placed the original ad.

Although the court upheld that language, privacy groups accused Craigslist of taking advantage of customers. In a blog post for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group, Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff lawyer, argued that Craigslist had used “oppressive” terms to gain ownership of customers listings last year.

“Did you post an ad on Craigslist between July 26, 2012, and August 8, 2012?” the blog post asks. “If so, bad news for you. Turns out that Craigslist, and not you, owns that ad. In other words, if you try to repost it to another site, you could actually be infringing Craigslist’s copyright. Sound ridiculous? We think so, too.”

Today’s Scuttlebot: Facebook Beheadings and Privacy Champions

The technology reporters and editors of The New York Times scour the Web for important and peculiar items. For Tuesday, selections include opinions, images and consumer stories about Google Glass, a report on how online companies handle government requests for personal information and a warning about the use of data from personal tracking devices and apps.

Thieves Break Into a Personal ‘Data Vault’ Company

A company that describes itself as a vault for personal data has suffered an embarrassing heist: intruders penetrated its computer system and looted its customers’ names, addresses and in some cases, dates of birth and login passwords.

The company, Reputation.com, based in Redwood City, Calif., told customers in an e-mail sent around 5 p.m. Pacific time Tuesday that it had detected a breach into its system and immediately reset customer passwords. It does not believe credit card information was taken.

Passwords are especially coveted items because many people reuse them across multiple Web sites, and cyberthieves have in turn developed new automated ways to try and reuse them to ferret out more valuable data from different Web sites.

LivingSocial and Evernote experienced similar breaches in recent months.

In its e-mail to users, Reputation said it had “identified, interrupted and swiftly shut down an external attack on our secure network.” The company said it had encrypted user passwords, which could theoretically still protect them, but has not yet said what algorithm it used to protect customer data. Reputation has not yet responded to a request for comment, except to point to the e-mail it sent to customers.

Reputation’s co-founder, Michael Fertik, has described the company as a “data vault,” or “a bank for other people’s data.”

Its services include identifying Web sites that sell personal data, removing personal data from some sites and blocking online tracking.

Re-Reengineering the Corporation

Could we be on the verge of another workplace revolution?

Asana, the workplace social media company co-founded by one of Facebook’s founders, is stepping up from helping little companies and teams organize work to structuring the output of the biggest companies around.

Asana, based in San Francisco, helps companies organize by dividing work into tasks carried out by different teams. The idea is to closely link the functions of e-mail, the center of collaboration and communication, with data repositories, where things like software projects or marketing campaigns are created, worked on and stored. The company calls the result a “team brain” that enables work to move quickly.

First versions of the Web-based software were introduced 18 months ago, at no charge, and were meant for teams of 30. The idea was fairly simple: name a task the company has to do, then subdivide it into parts that can be assigned and tracked.

This was primarily used by small companies, like a bicycle shop, or groups inside a company, like a newspaper’s online news department. It was particularly popular with engineering departments, and a paid version that allowed for more people attracted companies like Airbnb and Dropbox after it was released a year ago.

On Wednesday, Asana introduced a version called “Organizations,” designed to be used by thousands of employees at the same time, across different parts of a large organization. It works like the original Asana, but includes management capabilities like being able to view multiple tasks, access controls over who can see and work on something, and automated sign-up of new employees.

“We’ve had to think about the needs of information technology managers, and the work processes at older companies,” said Dustin Moskovitz, the company’s co-founder. “Unlike e-mail, you don’t have to read every note, and you do less running around trying to coordinate things.”

Mr. Moskovitz, along with Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, and Chris Hughes, created Facebook in 2004. He left Facebook in 2008 and with a veteran of both Facebook and Google named Justin Rosenstein started working on Asana in 2009.

No one at the 40-person company has titles, but the two men are presumably something like technical and operational bosses. Coming from freewheeling, fast-growing companies, it took them awhile to realize that some traits of Asana needed adjusting for the rest of the world.

“When we started I was most naïve about the needs companies have around access control,” said Mr. Rosenstein. “I think we’ve corrected that.” Now, a boss at a company where people are quite protective of their titles can see what subordinates are working on which projects, and open up all the related work in the project.

Mr. Rosenstein said Asana has “hundreds” of paying customers, including accounting firms, automotive companies and retailers, as well as tech companies. The free version, he said, is used by “tens of thousands” of organizations.

That is hardly enough to declare victory, but there are other social software companies for organizing work, including Yammer, which in 2012 was purchased by Microsoft for $1.2 billion, and Jive Software, a publicly traded company with a market capitalization of about $900 million. These firms say work is done faster when people can collaborate closely, inspect work while it is in process, bring new people into the group as needed, and easily call up new versions of a project. In every case, the social software companies say fewer people are needed to track work.

All of which raises the prospect of another management revolution in the offing, similar to those described in the 1993 book “Reengineering the Corporation,” written by Michael Hammer and James Champy. In “Reengineering,” the idea was to change workflows to more closely match desired outcomes. Much of the effect, however, was owed to newer communications technologies like e-mail, which ended the need for large amounts of middle management. The “social” corporation could wield its own ax, as soon as the right theoretician comes along.

Yahoo Enhances Its Parental Leave Policy

Marissa Mayer is trying to repair Yahoo’s image by upgrading benefits for working parents.

On Tuesday, Yahoo announced a revised paid leave policy for new parents, more than doubling the time, in some cases, that employees with babies are able to take off. The new benefit comes after Yahoo spurred a nationwide debate over family-friendly work policies when it banned working from home in February.

Ms. Mayer, Yahoo’s chief executive, has said that attracting talented workers is crucial for the company’s turnaround. Lavish benefits are a ubiquitous weapon in Silicon Valley’s talent wars, and since she arrived at Yahoo last year, she has showered employees with perks including new phones and free food.

So it was a surprise when the company rescinded a major benefit by instituting a policy that employees could no longer work from home, which it said would boost productivity and morale. Ms. Mayer’s own very short maternity leave shortly after she joined the company only added to doubts that Yahoo was a welcoming place for working parents, as did her comments that having a baby was easy and reports that she built a nursery next to her office.

Of course, Ms. Mayer’s child care resources are not those of ordinary working parents. The company also said Tuesday that it paid Ms. Mayer $36.6 million last year, after hiring her in July, most of that sum in the form of stock options that have not yet vested. It said executive compensation was closely tied to performance. Yahoo’s shares are up 56 percent since she was hired.

Ms. Mayer was pregnant when she was appointed chief executive, and that quickly made her a poster child for working parents. The extra attention also generated a greater level of scrutiny of the company’s human resources decisions.

With the new parental leave policy, first reported by NBC Bay Area, Yahoo is signaling support for working parents. Mothers who give birth receive 16 weeks paid leave, more than double what they previously got in most cases. New fathers and mothers who have a child through adoption, surrogacy or foster care receive eight weeks.

New parents also receive $500 to spend on things like food and child care after a new baby comes home, which Yahoo calls “daily habits reimbursement,” a nod to Ms. Mayer’s strategy of convincing people to turn to Yahoo products for daily habits like e-mail.

And Yahoo is not forgetting employees without children. New pets will receive Yahoo-branded products, as will babies. And for every five years that employees work at the company, they will receive an eight-week, unpaid sabbatical.

Yahoo’s policy is considerably more generous than most companies in the United States, where paid parental leave lags far behind other developed nations. But it is not quite as competitive as that of Ms. Mayer’s former employer, Google, which offers about five months of paid leave for mothers, seven weeks for fathers and $500 for baby expenses.

“We’ve been very focused on making Yahoo the best place to work,” Sara Gorman, a Yahoo spokeswoman, said in a statement. “Recently, we introduced some new and improved benefits to support the happiness and well-being of Yahoos and their families.”

Yoga Instructors, Tile Layers, Others Get New Outlet for Web Lessons

Online education is a sprawling category that encompasses everything from open online courses on physics, history and other college subjects to intensive, multiday workshops on photography on sites like CreativeLive.

Then there’s the wild teaching scene on sites like YouTube, where it sometimes is difficult to find a life skill for which there is not a short how-to video made by somebody, somewhere. I realized this once when, flushed with frustration, I searched for a video on YouTube on how to convert an uncooperative Transformer action figure into vehicle mode. A capable young instructor made me, and my child, very happy that day.

A new start-up, Curious, believes it has created a better way for the little guys on YouTube and other video sites to teach. While YouTube is for video of all stripes, Curious, founded by a former Intuit executive, Justin Kitch, gives people a set of Web tools specially tailored for developing video lessons and making money from them.

Let’s say you have a killer technique for building a dresser. The site, which opens to the public on Wednesday, lets you divide your lesson into chapters, with quizzes that students have to take before advancing to the next stage. Curious gives you a way to suggest a set of tools that might be handy for making the dresser, like a dovetail jig and router, along with a method for embedding links where people can buy the tools on the Web.

The first couple of chapters of each lesson are free for viewers, but they have to formally enroll in the course, paying a small fee if the teacher has decided to charge for the lesson. Curious will allow teachers to charge between $1 and $5 a lesson. During a private testing phase for the site, Mr. Kitch said music, fitness and foreign language lessons have shown signs of generating the most viewer interest.

Mr. Kitch believes the enrollment requirement will help elevate the quality of comments that form around lessons on Curious by weeding out the troublemakers who often leave inflammatory comments on YouTube videos. “It’s not that you can’t accomplish some of this on YouTube, but trying to get interaction on YouTube is a bear,” Mr. Kitch said. “Comments are so horrific and gross. YouTube wasn’t made for teaching. It was just for showing random videos.”

Curious has raised $7.5 million from Redpoint Ventures and individual investors like Bill Campbell, the chairman of Intuit and a veteran adviser to Silicon Valley leaders.

In a phone interview, Mr. Campbell said that it would take Curious a while before it had a large library of high-quality lessons, but that he expected it would attract good teachers with its tools for organizing lessons. “I don’t think this is like Khan Academy,” he said. “I view these as upbeat fun things to do in your spare time.”

When asked what lessons he has taken on the site, Mr. Campbell said he enjoyed one on beer making. “I thought the salsa dancing one was really funny,” he said. “When am I going to do that?”

Daily Report: Hotels, Airports and Airlines Struggle With Demand for Wi-Fi

Travelers hitting the road with their mobile electronic devices have three questions about staying connected away from home: will there be Wi-Fi, how much will it cost and how well will it work? Increasingly, it is that last question that matters most, reports Susan Stellin on Wednesday in The New York Times.

Hotels, airports and airlines are struggling to keep up with customers streaming movies on their tablets and hosting online meetings on their laptops, with varying degrees of success. While hoteliers and airport authorities have been fighting the bandwidth battle for years, airlines are still installing Wi-Fi on many aircraft and are already confronting challenges.

Travelers who want Wi-Fi in the air cannot always tell if a plane will have Internet service when they book their tickets. Prices for service are still evolving, and the quality of the connection does not come close to matching what most people are used to on the ground.

“No matter what the system is, none of them right now are showing the ability to keep up with passenger demand,” said Mary Kirby, editor in chief of Airline Passenger Experience magazine. “I’ve heard complaints about every single system.”

Acknowledging the technical hurdles involved in delivering Internet service to a plane traveling 500 miles an hour, Ms. Kirby said airlines and their connectivity partners needed to better manage passenger expectations.

“It’s time for the industry to say, ‘Here’s reasonably what you can expect, and it’s not an at-home experience,’ ” she said. “A passenger should expect to be able to use social media and check e-mail. But you’re not going to be able to send e-mails with really big files, and you’re not going to be able to stream video.”

Powering Up the Cloud

A new product from one of Silicon Valley’s legendary engineers also says a lot about where the industry is going.

On Wednesday, Arista Networks, a maker of very fast computer networking equipment, announced a data switch that can move outputs of 10 gigabits a second, or gps, as well as 40 gps and 100 gps. At the fast end, that is more than enough to transmit two high-definition movies a second, from each of 96 ports, or data outlets, on a single switch. A few years ago, 1 gps was considered lightning-fast.

The switch can also manage 100,000 computer servers at once in concert with other Arista products, compared with about 6,000 servers on a typical switch now. Information moves through the switch in less than five nanoseconds.

If successful, the product could enable much bigger and more efficient cloud computing centers than exist today.

“This changes what people can do in a data center,” said Andreas Bechtolsheim, Arista’s cofounder and chief development officer. “It’s a threefold improvement in power efficiency, and three times the performance. In this industry you don’t get threefold improvement: People are excited when Intel increases from eight cores to 10 on a chip.”

Mr. Bechtolsheim is a cofounder of Sun Microsystems, and the first major investor in Google. His cofounders at Arista include David Cheriton, a Stanford Computer Science professor who founded two other companies with Mr. Bechtolsheim, and has long dreamed of building a very large-scale operating system for cloud computing. The third founder, Jayshree Ullal, was in charge of the data center and switching business at Cisco Systems.

Arista plans to sell the product, called 7500E (where do they get these terrific names?) for less than prevailing market prices. One hundred gigabit equipment can cost $100,000 per port, once extras are counted in. The Arista product is expected to cost about a tenth that, said Ms. Ullal, who is Arista’s chief executive. The founders of Arista consciously chose to build their machines with standard industry semiconductors, rather than the custom chips that Cisco historically used to make fast switches.

Most of its initial customers probably won’t be motivated by price, however. Arista has been popular with high-speed financial traders, large cloud computing companies and big data supercomputing businesses. In most of these fields, speed matters more than cost. While there are few companies like these, they tend to buy in bulk.

Longer term, however, the switch could attract more companies to get into building clouds, and could also make Arista an important part of the move to software-defined networking, or SDN. SDN is expected to make even bigger and more powerful computing clouds, because it will automate many processes that now must be done manually. And the pricing, along with the move to SDN, may make life difficult for Cisco, which now dominates the high-end market, but does not have an SDN product.

“This makes us a viable alternative to Cisco,” Ms. Ullal said.

But for over a year, Cisco has been working on a secret project to get into SDN, headed by Mario Mazzola, at one time Ms. Ullal’s boss.

Cisco would not comment on the Arista product, as it had not yet examined the switch. But Colin Kincaid, vice president of product management at Cisco, said, “Mario is watching Arista very closely.”

Mark Fabbi, an analyst with Gartner, called the Arista product, “a couple of different plays against Cisco.” He explained, “There is not just the 100 gigabit, there is the seamless transition with other speeds, so there is a lot more flexibility.” If such a product was made by Cisco or another large vendor, he said, “you’d expect them to have a premium price, not come down.”

Mr. Fabbi noted that Cisco, in addition to making hardware, is moving more into selling services, and helping companies with technology decision making. “Cisco is trying to move across several businesses, while Arista is doing pure technology,” he said. “These two could end up coexisting.”

Powering Up the Cloud

A new product from one of Silicon Valley’s legendary engineers also says a lot about where the industry is going.

On Wednesday, Arista Networks, a maker of very fast computer networking equipment, announced a data switch that can move outputs of 10 gigabits a second, or gps, as well as 40 gps and 100 gps. At the fast end, that is more than enough to transmit two high-definition movies a second, from each of 96 ports, or data outlets, on a single switch. A few years ago, 1 gps was considered lightning-fast.

The switch can also manage 100,000 computer servers at once in concert with other Arista products, compared with about 6,000 servers on a typical switch now. Information moves through the switch in less than five nanoseconds.

If successful, the product could enable much bigger and more efficient cloud computing centers than exist today.

“This changes what people can do in a data center,” said Andreas Bechtolsheim, Arista’s cofounder and chief development officer. “It’s a threefold improvement in power efficiency, and three times the performance. In this industry you don’t get threefold improvement: People are excited when Intel increases from eight cores to 10 on a chip.”

Mr. Bechtolsheim is a cofounder of Sun Microsystems, and the first major investor in Google. His cofounders at Arista include David Cheriton, a Stanford Computer Science professor who founded two other companies with Mr. Bechtolsheim, and has long dreamed of building a very large-scale operating system for cloud computing. The third founder, Jayshree Ullal, was in charge of the data center and switching business at Cisco Systems.

Arista plans to sell the product, called 7500E (where do they get these terrific names?) for less than prevailing market prices. One hundred gigabit equipment can cost $100,000 per port, once extras are counted in. The Arista product is expected to cost about a tenth that, said Ms. Ullal, who is Arista’s chief executive. The founders of Arista consciously chose to build their machines with standard industry semiconductors, rather than the custom chips that Cisco historically used to make fast switches.

Most of its initial customers probably won’t be motivated by price, however. Arista has been popular with high-speed financial traders, large cloud computing companies and big data supercomputing businesses. In most of these fields, speed matters more than cost. While there are few companies like these, they tend to buy in bulk.

Longer term, however, the switch could attract more companies to get into building clouds, and could also make Arista an important part of the move to software-defined networking, or SDN. SDN is expected to make even bigger and more powerful computing clouds, because it will automate many processes that now must be done manually. And the pricing, along with the move to SDN, may make life difficult for Cisco, which now dominates the high-end market, but does not have an SDN product.

“This makes us a viable alternative to Cisco,” Ms. Ullal said.

But for over a year, Cisco has been working on a secret project to get into SDN, headed by Mario Mazzola, at one time Ms. Ullal’s boss.

Cisco would not comment on the Arista product, as it had not yet examined the switch. But Colin Kincaid, vice president of product management at Cisco, said, “Mario is watching Arista very closely.”

Mark Fabbi, an analyst with Gartner, called the Arista product, “a couple of different plays against Cisco.” He explained, “There is not just the 100 gigabit, there is the seamless transition with other speeds, so there is a lot more flexibility.” If such a product was made by Cisco or another large vendor, he said, “you’d expect them to have a premium price, not come down.”

Mr. Fabbi noted that Cisco, in addition to making hardware, is moving more into selling services, and helping companies with technology decision making. “Cisco is trying to move across several businesses, while Arista is doing pure technology,” he said. “These two could end up coexisting.”

Powering Up the Cloud

A new product from one of Silicon Valley’s legendary engineers also says a lot about where the industry is going.

On Wednesday, Arista Networks, a maker of very fast computer networking equipment, announced a data switch that can move outputs of 10 gigabits a second, or gps, as well as 40 gps and 100 gps. At the fast end, that is more than enough to transmit two high-definition movies a second, from each of 96 ports, or data outlets, on a single switch. A few years ago, 1 gps was considered lightning-fast.

The switch can also manage 100,000 computer servers at once in concert with other Arista products, compared with about 6,000 servers on a typical switch now. Information moves through the switch in less than five nanoseconds.

If successful, the product could enable much bigger and more efficient cloud computing centers than exist today.

“This changes what people can do in a data center,” said Andreas Bechtolsheim, Arista’s cofounder and chief development officer. “It’s a threefold improvement in power efficiency, and three times the performance. In this industry you don’t get threefold improvement: People are excited when Intel increases from eight cores to 10 on a chip.”

Mr. Bechtolsheim is a cofounder of Sun Microsystems, and the first major investor in Google. His cofounders at Arista include David Cheriton, a Stanford Computer Science professor who founded two other companies with Mr. Bechtolsheim, and has long dreamed of building a very large-scale operating system for cloud computing. The third founder, Jayshree Ullal, was in charge of the data center and switching business at Cisco Systems.

Arista plans to sell the product, called 7500E (where do they get these terrific names?) for less than prevailing market prices. One hundred gigabit equipment can cost $100,000 per port, once extras are counted in. The Arista product is expected to cost about a tenth that, said Ms. Ullal, who is Arista’s chief executive. The founders of Arista consciously chose to build their machines with standard industry semiconductors, rather than the custom chips that Cisco historically used to make fast switches.

Most of its initial customers probably won’t be motivated by price, however. Arista has been popular with high-speed financial traders, large cloud computing companies and big data supercomputing businesses. In most of these fields, speed matters more than cost. While there are few companies like these, they tend to buy in bulk.

Longer term, however, the switch could attract more companies to get into building clouds, and could also make Arista an important part of the move to software-defined networking, or SDN. SDN is expected to make even bigger and more powerful computing clouds, because it will automate many processes that now must be done manually. And the pricing, along with the move to SDN, may make life difficult for Cisco, which now dominates the high-end market, but does not have an SDN product.

“This makes us a viable alternative to Cisco,” Ms. Ullal said.

But for over a year, Cisco has been working on a secret project to get into SDN, headed by Mario Mazzola, at one time Ms. Ullal’s boss.

Cisco would not comment on the Arista product, as it had not yet examined the switch. But Colin Kincaid, vice president of product management at Cisco, said, “Mario is watching Arista very closely.”

Mark Fabbi, an analyst with Gartner, called the Arista product, “a couple of different plays against Cisco.” He explained, “There is not just the 100 gigabit, there is the seamless transition with other speeds, so there is a lot more flexibility.” If such a product was made by Cisco or another large vendor, he said, “you’d expect them to have a premium price, not come down.”

Mr. Fabbi noted that Cisco, in addition to making hardware, is moving more into selling services, and helping companies with technology decision making. “Cisco is trying to move across several businesses, while Arista is doing pure technology,” he said. “These two could end up coexisting.”