One way they often do this is by installing a system running Hadoop. This is the open source tool that evolved out of work done by Google and Yahoo, and basically takes big blocks of data and makes analyzing it a manageable process. The creation of a thriving business environment around Hadoop, which by itself is freely available, has attracted mountains of venture capital funding to start-ups such as Cloudera and Hortonworks.

Add another Hadoop player to the pile. Today, Mortar Data, a company devoted to making Hadoop easier to use, will announce a round of seed funding. Usually I don’t pay much attention to companies at the seed stage but in this case I made an exception, in part because the lineup of investors is so interesting. The lead investors are Chris Lynch, the former CEO of Vertica who left his job at Hewlett-Packard last month, and TechStars, the noted start-up accelerator, which is also a customer.

Other investors are Atlas Ventures, Genacast Ventures, and Great Oaks Ventures as well as Brightcove founder and CTO Bob Mason, and Matt Turck, managing director of Bloomberg Ventures, the venture capital arm of Bloomberg LP, the financial data and media concern. The precise amount of the funding hasn’t been disclosed.

As widely used as Hadoop is, it requires a lot of specialized knowledge, says K Young, Mortar’s CEO. Mortar’s secret is to use the Python programming language and Apache Pig, running on cloud infrastructure. The combination makes working with Hadoop a lot more accessible to people with more generalized programming knowledge. It’s not all that different from SQL. Easy enough that Vertica has said it will offer Mortar’s solution to its clients. That makes Mortar Data worth watching.

The Time Warner (TWX) publishing unit let more than 30 people go from its Essence and Entertainment Weekly titles yesterday. The NY Observer and Gawker have details; the NY Post’s Keith Kelly reports that Matt Turck and Charles Kammerer, publishers of This Old House and Golf Magazine, respectively, are also out.

That brings the total body count (announced firings + requested resignations) to about 250, which means that CEO Ann Moore still has a long way to go before she gets to her rough target of 600 job cuts this year. Which means the next few weeks will continue to be unpleasant.

UPDATE: Add another 8-10 from In Style.

One thing Time Inc. staffers won’t be seeing during that time: More memos announcing details of the reorg. Executives at the company seem to have concluded that internal communications that have been showing up at this Web site and others haven’t helped employee morale. That seems sensible. But it also means that employees have even less information about their fate than before.

Meanwhile, I’m still collecting tips. As always, I keep all correspondence anonymous: peter@allthingsd.com.