There’s been a few notable developments this week in the world of big data, some centering around the consumer end, others appealing to the enterprise.  From cutting edge news delivery methods to a furthered exploration of open cloud services, big data is finding its way into every industry, benefitting every aspect therein.  Here’s some of the key highlights in big data this past week.

Mobile Computing

This week one of the leading news discovery providers, Evri, launched an iPad app that lets users round up the best news headlines based on the topics they chose.  The new iPad app called Evri for iPad is an improvement on news filtering capabilities, keying in on Evri’s core competency in data filtering and organization.  The new iPad app takes news discovery a step beyond RSS and socially-driven aggregators, tapping its own algorithms to offer a broader range of sources contributing to a personalized service.  Users can now find, index and follow more than 2.5 million popular news topics from over 15 thousand of the web’s best sources.

In Apple’s camp, its iOS software gets one more boost this week with the addition of an open source mobile BI iOS software development kit. The BI firm, Jaspersoft, launched an open source SDK called Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Suite 4.2 that will now integrate both big data and mobile and touch-centric environments development for better reporting, dashboarding, analysis, and data integration on iPad devices so companies can make better decisions.

Ecosystem for Open Cloud Operating System Evolves

A new open cloud initiative is leading an effort to create what amounts to a cloud operating system around the open source OpenStack platform.  Piston Cloud Computing, the enterprise OpenStack cloud company, has introduced Piston Enterprise OS (pentOS), an easy, secure and open cloud operating system for managing enterprise private cloud environments.  The first of its kind, pentOS uses Piston’s patent-pending Null-Tier Architecture to leverage companies to better manage big data where application workloads can easily move across public and private cloud computing environments.

Another important platform in the open source cloud movement, Hadoop, gains more support from an additional partner this week, by means of Cloudera’s latest team up.  Cloudera entered a partnership with solutions-based open R statistical analysis programming language provider, Revolution Analytics, to integrate Cloudera’s Distribution with Apache Hadoop (CDH3) with Revolution’s R Enterprise platform.  The integrated platform, RevoConnectR for Apache Hadoop, will enable developer to access Hadoop data stores and write MapReduce jobs directly with R.

Then there’s an update on the CRM analytics front.  ClickFox and TeraData announced a partnership this week to promote ClickFox’s CRM analytics offerings to Teradata customers. Teradata customers will now gain a greater competitive edge with ClickFox’s next-generation analytics platform by providing cross-channel customer and product experience analysis of data.

Data Storage Product Launch

EMC also rolled out two new product upgrades for cloud backup services for enterprises. Mozy, EMC’s subsidiary, adds the Mozy Data Shuttle service that can now back up millions of files and move terabytes of data to the cloud faster than before.  And the improved file scanning capabilities can decrease the time it takes to complete the initial backup process over datacenters and the cloud.  The upgrades are an attempt to build an efficient information infrastructure that lets you store, protect, optimize, and leverage your big data information in the cloud after EMC lost some credibility over the RSA breach earlier this year.

Lastly there’s an update from big data storage solutions provider DataDirect Networks. The company added the SFA10K-X array, which is bundled with DDN’s multi-threaded SFA OS. The new VMAX arrays platform is VMware-certified and supports GRID Scaler, EXAScaler and NASScale.  The company also announced a special version of SFA10K to arrays to run applications and file systems based on Lustre and IBM’s GPFS.