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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...