After a few months of evaluating Hypertable project, many of you probably noticed that Hypertable has a new sponsor - Baidu. Here are the numbers according to Wikipedia:

Baidu provides an index of over 740 million web pages, 80 million images, and 10 million multimedia files.[5] The domain baidu.com attracted at least 5.5 million visitors annually by 2008 according to a Compete.com scentury

, and what's more Baidu is going to throw Hypertable at their engineers and the whole infrastructure will be operating under the control of Hypertable. Neat! This is a no doubt one of the early symptoms of project quality acknowledged by the community.

Here's the official announcement: Baidu now an Official Sponsor of Hypertable

Update: Here you can find the official announcement on the Hypertable PR page