It’s the next big, cool, hip thing. Simply put foursquare is a location based tool/game that let’s you see where your friends are and earn badges for all sorts of challenges.

So why the fascination? I can do this via txt, email, twitter, facebook, right!? Not really. It’s the location piece that makes foursquare unique. I know exactly what business my friend is in and not just some confusing GPS coordinates or a dot on a google map. Bars are beginning to use this as a tool to bring in crowds with notes like “the mayor drinks free.” What is the mayor? This is the fun part. The person that visits the location the most is automatically awarded the mayorship. Don’t worry that isn’t the only award there are tons of badges you earn for all kinds of things like the gym rat and school night when you are out past 3am on a week night.

Grab the iPhone app and see what all the cool kids are talking about.

What did the team at Yahoo do when they realized they had an old proprietary back-end application running their core search business? They moved to an open source map reduce implementation from the Apache Software Foundation named Hadoop. This is a huge move and shows that sometimes even a core piece of your business is better accomplished with software that someone else has built. In Yahoo’s case they were able to accomplish the same tasks 34% faster on their new 10,000 core Linux cluster using Hadoop.