A quartet of Valley veterans has started Cloudera. They're pitching it as "Red Hat for Hadoop." Hadoop is an open-source implementation of Google's MapReduce infrastructure software, supposedly useful for Internet-computing projects. Cloudera plans to offer technical support for Hadoop. And yet here I thought the…
The great hope of the Valley, the startup everyone thought was the next Google, the company whose IPO might restart the stock-market gold rush for everyone, is not well. Why? Look to its founder. Mark Zuckerberg is mismanaging his creation's transition to greatness. In Facebook's own parlance, the company's plight is…
We know Zuck was close to Adam D'Angelo. They went to High School together and even built the digital music software that first igniting Zuckerberg's entrepreneurial imagination back in his teens. Cohler was employee number five at Facebook — there when the company was one room big. Zuck recruited Hammerbacher, whom…
Want to hear from one of the geniuses who worked on pricing subprime mortgages? Facebook's Jeff Hammerbacher speaks at Yahoo Brickhouse today at noon. While you're there, ask Brickhouse manager Salim Ismail about his trouble with the taxman. If that doesn't exhaust you, there are six, count them, six Macworld parties…
Jeff Hammerbacher, a research scientist at Facebook, is giving a presentation at Yahoo today about large-scale data analysis. The Harvard grad's prior experience before coming to Facebook? Developing price models for mortgage-backed securities at Bear Stearns — the same kind of securities that led Bear to write off…
A tip for those of you trying to mingle with successful entrepreneurs and VCs: Attend more than just the standard tech meet-and-greets. The people who are really in a position to help you with your startup never go to them anyway. So where to go instead? Check out events like last night's Lotus Vodka release party…
