$5.7M for Hadoop, In-q-tel, and a16z. Killer....

http://gigaom.com/cloud/platfora-gets-5-7m-to-make-hadoop-mainstream/

I'm not sure what makes this deal any hotter than any of the others in September 2011.

Furthermore, the fact that Google only paid $66 million for Zagat puts a little bit of cold water on the acquisition environment right now...

No reason other than I like it better as I think the market they are in is fascinating. Having done a big data, cloud based security-as-a-service product and a big data cloud based phone record/CRM analytics company, it's good to see deals recognizing the importance of big data visualization.

The $66MM for Zagat is not a fair consideration. They aren't a technology company.

Actually, that's a fair point about Zagat. Oddly, Google is now officially in the business of content written by humans. Hello Yahoo!

Back to Greg's original point: Big Data Visualization will be huge, I agree., but I love this line in the GigaOm article:

The Platfora software, he says, will let users easily determine the parameters of the data they want to analyze. It all sounds great on paper, but there is at least one catch to Platfora: Customers will still have to employ at least a few Hadoop-savvy folks to manage their Hadoop clusters.

If only there were a way to train 14 million Americans to be Hadoop-savvy.

Or Node.js-savvy. There seems to be no shortage of need for those folks, either.

Sorry, I'm still obsessing over the need for a second stimulus and Tom Friedman's awesome piece on The Whole Truth.

It's easy in Silicon Valley to get caught up in hot companies and forget that a lot of the country -- in fact, a lot of the world -- is struggling right now.