This week, Yahoo! joined forces with partner Hortonworks to host the 5th annual Hadoop Summit in San Jose, California. If you follow the technology industry at all, you know that big data and cloud computing are two of its hottest topics these days, and Hadoop is the open source technology at the epicenter of all that. Despite its funny name, Hadoop is amazing at helping companies glean insights from the massive amounts of data being created and collected every day – whether from social networks, weblogs, sensors, mobile devices, you name it.

We’re proud to have taken Hadoop from a research project back in 2005 to what it is today – the de facto standard for managing big data. With 3,000 attendees, 2012 marked the largest Hadoop Summit yet, and Yahoo! stood out yet again as the leader in both using and contributing to Apache Hadoop. Scott Burke, our SVP of advertising and data platforms, gave a keynote address about “Leadership at the Frontiers of Hadoop.” Check out his opening video. He discussed how Yahoo! uses data to understand cause and effect relationships with our customers, enabling our predictive approach to both personalization and advertising.

At Yahoo!, we just love Hadoop because it gives us the data crunching power to personalize our products for the 700 million of you who use them. Hadoop lets us deliver 45,000 uniquely personalized home pages every 5 minutes, and block 20 billion spam emails a day.

Yahoo! has already contributed more than 70 percent of Hadoop’s code and we have hundreds of Hadoop engineers and scientists who are running hundreds of thousands of Hadoop jobs each day on 140 petabytes of data – those are some huge numbers! Today, we’re all about pioneering the cutting edge of scale by using Hadoop to deliver big data business insight in near real-time. Stay tuned for more as we continue to push the envelope with big data.