There were several major highlights this week coming from the analytics space, and one is the story of an upcoming travel service that aims to achieve for its industry what Google did for search.

Hopper is a 2007 startup that is behind Hack/Reduce and a number of other initiatives. One of the founders is Fred Lalonde, and he stopped by theCube to talk over his company’s current project: a travel planning engine that will debut this summer with the premise of a whole new experience.

Lalonde’s take is that there isn’t much going on in this space right now. If you search for the name of a city or a popular destination you’ll receive a lot of results, but most of them won’t be relevant. What Hopper’s solution  will do is aggregate the relevant ones from the biggest travel sites and display them in a way that makes sense, and is more importantly considerably more convenient.

Here’s the full story from the interview.

Hopper still has a long way to go before it can start making travels’ lives easier, but a startup called LinkSmart already made its platform available when it launched out of stealth yesterday. The cloud software analyzes the links that publishers embed in their content, and identifies opportunities such as popular keywords and advertising openings.

Another company that had a big update this week is Sumo Logic. Its log management solution is now available for free in a new edition that can be deployed on AWS, but is limited to only 3.5GB. The announcement was released just a day after open-source giant Red Hat debuted Data Services Platform 5.3. The latest version of the software supports more NoSQL databases, simplifies more processed does things noticeably overall.