Ari Balogh is the former CTO and EVP of Products at Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO). Now he is bringing his experience at a major Internet media company to Internet toolbar company StumbleUpon.com as the VP of engineering. He will have a major focus on the “recommendation technology” at StumbleUpon. Balogh will also be extending StumbleUpon’s development of the open-source Hadoop database HBase. Balogh will report to StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp. StumbleUpon has 15 million monthly users and hits one billion recommendations per month. StumbleUpon recently raised $17 million in funding after they spun out of eBay in 2009. eBay acquired StumbleUpon for $75 million in cash in 2007. [AllThingsD]

Doug Cutting, co-creator of the Hadoop technology that powers Yahoo!’s search index is leaving to join Cloudera.  Cutting will be joining Cloudera at the end of August.  Cutting is heading out shortly after Microsoft made a deal with Yahoo! to power their search engine and share in ad revenues.  However Cutting claims that his resignation does not have to do with the deal.

“This has been in the works for awhile and is unrelated,” stated Cutting. “I am definitely not leaving in any sort of protest, and the thing I like least about this move is that it might be perceived that way.”

Cutting will be doing a similar job at Cloudera.  He will continue working with Yahoo! developers at Cloudera.  Hadoop is open source software made for data mining.

[via SearchEngineLand]

Cloudera is a custom enterprise software company that builds products around the Hadoop platform.  The company has raised $6 million in funding, bringing their total to about $11 million.

This round of funding was led by Greylock Partners and previous investor Accel participated.  Other Cloudera investors includes Diane Greene and Marten Mickos.  The company was founded in 2008 by Mike Olson, Christophe Bisciglia, Dr. Amr Awadallah, and Jeff Hammerbacher.

[via GigaOM]