Mac users recently found out that when they search for hotels at the Orbitz website, they were provided with more expensive offers than PC users. This is possible through Hadoop, a technology platform capable of gathering information. The open source technology was able to gather information like those who use Mac computers choose more expensive hotels. Therefore when a user uses Mac in browsing Orbitz, he is provided with hotels of quality rankings.

Large businesses are excited over the prospect of tapping tons of information and processing it so that such data can be beneficial to their businesses. Information from Facebook and Twitter posts can be gathered automatically from various electronic devices which can connect to the internet. The number one platform that is able to do that is Hadoop. A lot of companies listed in the Fortune 500 are now using the technology. Hadoop is widely regarded as a complimentary technology with database players like IBM and Oracle.

However, the use of Hadoop is being pioneered by small Silicon Valley companies such as MapR in San Jose, Hortonworks in Sunnyvale, and Cloudera in Palo Alto. These companies provide support and services to business entities. With social media information available every minute, it has become imperative for business enterprises to understand what the information mean so that these companies can react in real time. Last year, it was reported that 240,000 web content, 34,000 tweets, and 600 blog posts has been published per minute on the internet. With these new phenomena, focus has now shifted to unstructured data instead of database systems.