The 2014 Cassandra Summit went on for the last two days. You may have been there if you're a hardcore Cassandra fan, given the fact that it is the "world's largest gathering of Cassandra developers," as you can see:

(via Apache Cassandra)

This year's event, though, also marked the release of Cassandra v2.1. According to Apache's press release, v2.1 should bring 50% better performance compared to 2.0 (says Jonathan Ellis), as well as a handful of new features described by Duyhai Doan, such as CQL3 tuple and user defined type (UDT).

Check out Apache's full release, or just head straight to v2.1 itself to get up to date or get started with Cassandra.