From the post:
Last week, we announced our $1.8 million fundraising. For those of you who follow big data startups, our blog post probably felt…underwhelming. Startups typically come out and make a huge publicity splash, jam-packed with buzzwords and vision galore. While we feel very fortunate to have what we need to help us grow, we know that VC funding is merely a means, and not an end.
But now you get to see us get really excited, because Mortar’s Hadoop PaaS and open source framework for big data is now publicly available. This means if you want to try it, you can activate your trial right now on our site without having to talk to anyone (unless you want to!).
You can get started on Mortar using Web Projects (using Mortar entirely online through the browser) or Git Projects (using Mortar locally on your own machine with the Mortar development framework). You can see more info about both here.
All trial accounts come with our full Hadoop PaaS, unlimited use of the Mortar framework, our site, and dev tools, and 10 free Hadoop node-hours. (You can get another 15 free node-hours per month and additional support at no cost by simply adding your credit card to the account.)
Mortar accepts PIG scripts and “real Python.” So you can use your favourite Python libraries with Hadoop.
I don’t know if there is any truth to the rumor that Mortar supports Python because Lars Marius Garshol and Steve Newcomb use it. So don’t ask me.
I first saw this in a tweet by David Fauth.