Well, we’re really excited to have announced our first round of funding with two great investment firms: Hummer Winblad and US Venture Partners. Their DNA is a great fit with the company and the funding enables us to ramp up execution on our vision of making Apache Hadoop and MapReduce easier to use.

Some great infrastructure plumbing is being developed in and around Hadoop itself and we’re looking forward to continuing our innovation with front-end software that reduces the learning curve and improves the ease of working with massive data sets on Hadoop-based infrastructure. We’ll continue to support new versions and distributions of Hadoop and cloud-based services such as Amazon Elastic MapReduce as they evolve.

Let us know if you’ve got something you’d like to see us incorporate. We like to think we’re good listeners.

And if you haven’t tried it already, take a look at our first product, Karmasphere Studio Community Edition. We just released an incremental version. Best of all, it’s free and, we’re happy to say, people are finding it really easy to use.