Hadoop gets plenty of attention from investors and the IT press, but it’s very possible we haven’t seen anything yet. All the action of the last year has just set the stage for what should be a big year full of new companies, new users and new techniques for analyzing big data. That’s not to say there isn’t room for alternative platforms, but with even Microsoft abandoning its competitive effort and pinning its big data hopes on Hadoop, it’s difficult to see the project’s growth slowing down.

Here are six big things Hadoop has going for it as 2012 approaches.

1. Investors love it

Cloudera has raised million since 2009. Newcomers MapR and Hortonworks have raised million and million (according to multiple sources), respectively. And that’s just at the distribution layer, which is the foundation of any Hadoop deployment. Up the stack, Datameer, Karmasphere and Hadapt have each raised around million, and then are newer funded companies such as Zettaset, Odiago and Platfora. Accel Partners has started a 0 million big data fund to feed applications utilizing Hadoop and other core big data technologies. If anything, funding around Hadoop should increase in 2012, or at least cover a lot more startups.

2. Competition breeds success

Whatever reasons companies had to not use Hadoop should be fading fast, especially when it comes to operational concerns such as performance and cluster management. This is because MapR, Cloudera and Hortonworks are in a heated competition to win customers’ business. Whereas the former two utilize open-source Apache Hadoop code for their distributions, MapR is pushing them on the performance front with its semi-proprietary version of Hadoop. This means an increased pace of innovation within Apache, and a major focus on management tools and support to make Hadoop easier to deploy and monitor. These three companies have lots of money, and it’s all going toward honing their offerings, which makes customers the real winners.

3. What learning curve?

Aside from the improved management and support capabilities at the distribution layer, those aforementioned up-the-stack companies are already starting to make Hadoop easier to use. Already, Karmasphere and Concurrent are helping customers write Hadoop workflows and applications, while Datameer and IBM are among the companies trying to make Hadoop usable by business users rather than just data scientists. As more Hadoop startups begin emerging from stealth mode, or at least releasing products, we should see even more innovative approaches to making analytics child’s play, so to speak.

4. Users are talking

It might not sound like a big deal, but the shared experiences of early Hadoop adopters could go a long way toward spreading Hadoop’s utility across the corporate landscape. It’s often said that knowing how to manage Hadoop clusters and write Hadoop applications is one thing, but knowing what questions to ask is something else altogether. At conferences such as Hadoop World, and on blogs across the web, companies including Walt Disney, Orbitz, LinkedIn, Etsy and others are telling their stories about what they have been able to discover since they began analyzing their data with Hadoop. With all these use cases abound, future adopters should have an easier time knowing where to get started and what types of insights they might want to go after.

5. It’s becoming less noteworthy

This point is critical, actually, to the long-term success of any core technology: at some point, it has to become so ubiquitous that using it’s no longer noteworthy. Think about relational databases in legacy applications — everyone knows Oracle, MySQL or SQL Server are lurking beneath the covers, but no one really cares anymore. We’re hardly there yet with Hadoop, but we’re getting there. Now, when you come across applications that involve capturing and processing lots of unstructured data, there’s a good chance they’re using Hadoop to do it. I’ve come across a couple of companies, however, that don’t bring up Hadoop unless they’re prodded because they’re not interested in talking about how their applications work, just the end result of better security, targeted ads or whatever it is they’re doing.

6. It’s not just Hadoop

If Hadoop were just Hadoop — that is, Apache MapReduce and the Hadoop Distributed File System — it still would be popular. But the reality is that it’s a collection of Apache projects that include everything from the SQL-like Hive query language to the NoSQL HBase database to machine-learning library Mahout. HBase, in particular, has proven particularly popular on its own, including at Facebook. Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR all incorporate the gamut of Hadoop projects within their distributions, and Cloudera recently formed the Bigtop project within Apache, which is a central location for integrating all Hadoop-related projects within the foundation. The more use cases Hadoop as a whole addresses, the better it looks.

Disclosure: Concurrent is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, the founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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• Defining Hadoop: the Players, Technologies and Challenges of 2011
• Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum
• Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight

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Even back then, there were computers for people who couldn’t afford the more expensive stuff. Take this Tandy, which costs little more than a upgraded Netbook today. From Core Memory, photographed by Mark Richards and written by John Alderman.

TRS-80 Model 1 (and Model 100)
Year created: 1977
Creator: Tandy Corporation
Cost: $399 ($599 with monitor)
Memory: 4KB ROM
Processor: Z-80

Despite Apple’s marketing message of personal empowerment and freedom, they weren’t giving away those Apple IIs. A computer—especially one with a price tag of $1,300 or more—was beyond the comfort range of most people in the country, and few parents considered such a thing necessary to child development. As far as business went, it would be a while before a “killer app”—a must-have application—would be developed for machines available at an affordable price.

The TRS-80 was in part an antidote to this. If parents were convinced of a computer’s necessity, but their pocketbooks couldn’t support an Apple, then $399, or even $99, was worth considering. For a business that wanted to experiment with computing, that was a reasonable asking price.

The system was developed by the Tandy buyer Don French and Homebrew Computer Club leader Steve Leininger, who was quoted by Creative Computing magazine at the time as saying he had rejected a company plan to sell a computer kit because “too many people can’t solder.” This was an interesting admission from the company that owned Radio Shack, famous at that time for selling electronics parts to hobbyists. Nevertheless, the TRS-80 was actually rather sophisticated. Four kilobytes of RAM were matched with 4K of ROM holding Radio Shack’s proprietary version of BASIC. The silver-and-black color scheme—even more than a beige box—evoked a kind of futuristic proletarian chic. Like other, similar systems, the TRS-80 used a cassette tape player as a storage device.

The early portable TRS-80 Model 100, designed by Kyocera and released in 1983, was evidence that, by that time, beige was winning the color war. Rugged and able to start up immediately, the Model 100 as utilitarian and much-beloved by traveling reporters.

Core Memory is a photographic exploration of the Computer History Museum’s collection, highlighting some of the most interesting pieces in the history of computers. These excerpts were used with permission of the publisher. Special thanks to Fiona!

The above photographs were taken by Mark Richards, whose work has appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Fortune, Smithsonian, Life and BusinessWeek. The eye-candy is accompanied by descriptions of each artifact to cover the characteristics and background of each object, written by John Alderman who has covered the culture of high-tech lifestyle since 1993, notably for Mondo 2000, HotWired and Wired News. A foreword is provided by the Computer History Museum’s Senior Curator Dag Spicer.

Or go see the real things at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

Gizmodo ’79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analog age gave way to the digital, and most of our favorite toys were just being born.

If you had asked me in the past about the utility of a netbook in each and every home, when you already have a desktop of your own, I would have said that I just cannot find a reason why such a device should be somewhere near my home. I considered it to be useful, but shame on me!

I find myself in the position to really need one and to actually yearn about a netbook, but guess what? I don’t have one and it makes me want to scream.

And this is one that I would certainly take into consideration, if I intended to buy myself a netbook. Not only because it is cheap, compared to those designed by famous manufacturers, but also because it is solar-powered and this makes it an environment friendly gadget.

A European technology company which is known as iUnika has just announced a solar-powered netbook, called GYY. It is possible for the device to be the world’s first of this kind, because I haven’t heard about anything similar so far. Anyway, it is energy efficient and very light, and it’s more than enough, right?

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But the main disadvantage is that, being eco-friendly, the netbook isn’t too… advanced, if I may say so, when it comes to its features. Therefore, here’s what you can expect of it: 128MB of RAM, 64GB SSD drive, a 400MHz processor, a 8-inch WVGA screen with a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels and an operating system which is said to be a “proprietary version of Linux”.

The advantage, on the other hand, is that it will be a cheap netbook that is expected to become available sometimes in June, in Europe only (for the moment, at least), for no more than 160 Euros.

(Source: Coolest-Gadgets)

European technology company iUnika has developed what looks to be the worlds first solar powered netbook. Designed to be as light weight and energy efficient as possible, the GYY defintely isn’t a gaming machine, but it could work well for a student or someone lost in the woods.

One important thing to realize is that because it is so eco-friendly, it’s not going to be powerful. Sporting a 400MHz CPU, 128MB of RAM, and a 64GB SSD drive (hey, that’s not bad), it’s not going to use much juice to begin with. It’s also running a proprietary version of Linux, and has an 8-inch screen with a whopping 800×400 resolution. But you don’t have to plug it into the wall, and it’s only going to cost about €160 ($200).

It’s hitting the European market in June, but there isn’t any word of it coming to US as of yet.

[via Gadgetmix.com]