Intro to HBase by Alex Baranau.
Slides from a presentation Alex did on HBase for a meetup in New York City on HBase.
Fairly high level overview but one of the better ones.
Should leave you with a good orientation to HBase and its capabilities.
Just in case you are looking for a project, ;-), it would be interesting to point into a slide deck like this one with links into tutorial and documentation for the product.
Thinking of the old “hub” document concept from HyTime so you would not have to hard code links in the source but could update them as newer material comes along.
Just in case you need some encouragement, think of every slide deck as an augmented marketing opportunity. Where you are leveraging not only the presentation but the other documentation and materials created by your group.