March 2012 Bay Area HBase User Group meetup summary by David S. Wang.
Let’s see:
- …early access program – HBase In Action
- …recent HBase releases
- …Moving HBase RPC to protobufs
- …Comparing the native HBase client and asynchbase
- …Using Apache Hive with HBase: Recent improvements
- …backups and snapshots in HBase
- …Apache HBase PMC meeting
Do you need any additional reasons to live in the Bay Area? 
Seriously, if you do, take advantage of the opportunity meetings like this one offer.
If you don’t, might be cheaper than air fare to create you own HBase/Hive ecosystem.