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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...

Silicon Valley's talent wars are going younger. Bay Area tech companies, already in a fierce fight for full-time hires, are now also battling to woo summer interns. Technology giants like Google Inc. have been expanding their summer-intern programs, while smaller tech companies are ramping up theirs in response—sometimes even luring candidates away from college. Dropbox Inc. plans to hire 30 engineering interns for next summer, up from nine this year, says engineering manager Rian Hunter, who adds the company wants interns to comprise one-third of its engineering team. The San Francisco-based file-sharing company this year dispatched its entire engineering team to recruit at more than a dozen colleges, up from just five schools last year, schmoozing recruits over dinners and through technical talks on subjects like how Dropbox reduces the amount of memory its desktop client uses.   Interns allow you to "try before you buy," says Bump Technologies Inc. Chief Execut...

Silicon Valley mainstays and startups like  Google  and  Dropbox  are hiring tons of interns for this coming summer, the  Wall Street Journal Reports . Dropbox plans to hire three times as many interns for this summer as for last summer. This would make interns one whole third of Dropbox's entire engineering team. Bump Technologies , maker of the popular bump-to-share-your-contact-info app, plans to hire ten interns this coming summer. These interns will make up a pretty large chunk of Bump's 30 employee office. Facebook  plans to hire 625 interns for this coming summer, while Google plans to hire more than a thousand youngsters for summer jobs. So why all the hiring up? Finding and keeping full-time hires is tough enough at a tech company because of rampant poaching, so these companies have been increasingly turning to college students for first-year employees. Most of these companies offer interns around $10,000 for a summer-long gig.