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Startups working on a technology called Hadoop have become talent magnets in Silicon Valley, hiring top engineers away from the likes of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook. And they've become a popular investment for ex-Cisco execs turned VCs, too.  Hadoop is software for managing "big data." It makes it cheap and easy to store massive bits of information and then sift through it to find interesting trends. For instance, Google's Flu Trends uses Hadoop to see where flu outbreaks are by watching where people are doing flu-related searches. Most of these folks could have their picks of startups. Why Hadoop? Hadoop lets companies build applications that were never before possible. It works with a mind-boggling amount of stored data -- petabytes  -- and runs on cheap hardware. In the past, applications with data this big needed a supercomputer to process and a big network to move the data around. Now, apps that analyze trends, predict the weather, sift through so...

A company owned by Google's founders has just bought a 1982 light attack Dornier Alpha Jet. H211 LLC owns several aircraft that are frequently used by Google Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and in an "unusual" agreement signed last year, H211 managed to get the rights to operate from an airstrip ten minutes away from Google HQ near the south end of San Francisco Bay, California. This isn't any ordinary airstrip, it is Moffett Field, owned by the NASA Ames Research Center… Not just anyone can land their private jet at Moffett Field. Located right next to Silicon Valley, it has had a lot of interest from the hi-tech billionaires to get permission to fly in and out of there. But there's a problem, Moffett Field isn't an ordinary airstrip, it is owned by NASA . NASA is a government department and with that comes certain rules. Unless the aircraft has a direct relationship with the NASA research being carried out, or a military flight, you'll have to ...