Big data is a segment we have been covering extensively here at SiliconANGLE, similarly to cloud and mobile. This is why it seemed more than appropriate to finally dedicate a weekly summary of the biggest news developments from this area in the past seven days.

First up, Zettaset revealed a new Hadoop security service named SHadoop.  The security space is a particular aspect of big data that has not yet been fully fleshed out, and Zettaset jumped on the opportunity: The offering, bundled up with Zettaset’s Orchestrator platform, introduces encryption and other features to ensure that the data being processed in a Hadoop deployment can be only accessed by the people permitted to see it.

Infochimps also had a launch. The big data marketplace/job board operator will be offering a tool that enables enterprises to better manage analytics in the cloud, a convergence point that has traditionally be accompanied by a host of issues and limitations.

Emerging Startups and Privacy Concerns

Also this week, a couple new players emerged in the big data analytics scene. The first is Skytree, a startup that official exited stealth mode yesterday. It offers Skytree Server, a data muncher no less than 10,000 times faster than some competing offerings according to the company, as well as related services.

The second company that got some buzz lately is Fan Appz, which developed a set of apps developed specifically to help marketers identify consumer trends in social media. The catchy name is coupled with sophisticated technology and math that enables users to extract insight from relatively limited data sets.

This topic leads us to the debate that grabbed this week’s headlines. The New York Times ran a piece about Target’s advanced analytics capabilities and the potentially frightening possibilities that go with it , such as the ability to guess whether or not a customer is pregnant with a great degree of accuracy.