Live from AWS re:Invent 2013, our roving studio theCUBE has been on the ground at Amazon’s cloud-friendly event all the way. For visitors and interested alike, we heartily suggest that you check up on our Resource Guide to see what you might have missed. We covered AWS re:Invent extensively with exclusive interviews from industry experts, all covered on SiliconANGLE’s blog.

But the enterprise market isn’t the only opportunity for cloud.  The consumer space is ripe with connected devices, facing a revolution in design and buyer expectation, such as a curved iPhone rumored to be released sometime next year.

Here is a recap of the top stories this week on SiliconANGLE.

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Amazon’s soft monopoly : 3 potential outcomes for public cloud | #reinvent

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John Furrier and Dave Vellante, theCUBE co-hosts, kicked off Day 2 of AWS re:Invent conference with Jerry Chen of Greylock Partners. As his bio reveals, “Jerry invests in new enterprise applications and in all aspects of cloud and application infrastructure,” so he was invited to elaborate on the OpenStack vs. Amazon bet.

“OpenStack is the great hope for the Enterprise,” said Furrier. “But Amazon is rolling out massive services; is it a two-horse race?” he asked.

“I don’t think it’s a two-horse race yet,” replied Chen, “but Amazon is quickly becoming the market soft monopoly in the public cloud. At their size and scale, it will soon become very hard to compete against them.”

See Chen’s entire segment below.

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AWS re:Invent 2013 : trends to watch

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AWS re:Invent is the largest gathering of developers and technical leaders from the AWS community. Held at the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas this year, attendees found over 175+ sessions, training bootcamps, hands-on labs, and a Hackathon, all designed to provide them deeper skills and knowledge of the AWS Cloud.

Amazon is taking on legacy vendors in its efforts to bring AWS to the enterprise, and there were several topics we were on the lookout for regarding the oncoming cloud wars. AWS vs. OpenStack was one of these topics, and theCUBE hosts were happy to ask their guests about this particular battle.

See all of our event-related trends and expectations here, and catch up on all our AWS re:Invent segments on our YouTube channel here.

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Matt Schvimmer on ServiceNow HR service automation

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SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier had a chance to sit down with Matt Schvimmer of ServiceNow to talk about the news of their HR Service Automation application. The conversation was about how their Service Automation platform can deliver an HR application that makes it easier for organizations to automate HR case management. This new application from ServiceNow manages the service relationships between HR and employees through a service catalog.

Watch the full conversation below:

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EMC Pivotal PaaS faces uphill battle against AWS

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EMC Pivotal has a major challenge trying to wrest a significant share of the online development market from industry leader AWS, says Wikibon CTO David Floyer in his latest Professional Alert. EMC firmly believes that mobile-cloud is the new application architecture. To gain a foothold in this market, it announced this week Pivotal One as a Platform–as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud platform.

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Curved iPhone coming 2014 : Five concepts to beat

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Whether you think Apple’s copying trends or setting new market standards, a curved iPhone screen could be in the works. The Cupertino phone maker is working on new iPhone designs that include bigger screens with curved glass and enhanced sensors, according to a recent Bloomberg report. There’s two curved-screen iPhone models planned for release during the second half of 2014, according to Bloomberg’s unnamed sources.

One model would feature larger displays with glass curving downward at the edges. With screens at 4.7 inches and 5.5 inches, the two models would be Apple’s largest iPhones, approaching the size of rival smartphones, including the 5.7-inch Galaxy Note 3 launched by Samsung in September.

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iPad Air might be thin, but storage fattens Apple’s profit margins

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Apple is the king of profit margins, and storage has become a lucrative service. Based on a recent report by research firm IHS Inc., The iPad Air that sells for $499 costs Apple $274 to make. That’s a 13 percent decrease from the estimated $316 that it cost Apple to make the third-generation iPad, introduced last year. It turns out, the more storage you get, the heftier Apple’s profit. If you decide to get the 32-gigabyte version instead of the 16-gigabyte model of the iPad Air, IHS estimates the additional 16GB only costs Apple an additional $8.40 to make, yet sells for $100 more.

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How the race to zero is changing Hadoop’s landscape | #BigDataNYC

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The analytics space has come a long way since SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE first went on air in 2010. Whereas four years ago CIOs were just beginning to grasp the potential of Big Data, enterprises today are adopting Hadoop at an organizational level to make information a bigger part of their decision-making processes. TheCUBE hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante sat down with Jeff Kelly, the author of a recent Wikibon study that discovered that a significant percentage of enterprises are struggling to achieve expected returns on their Big Data investments, to discuss the company’s bold ambitions and its role in the ecosystem.

Watch the full interview below: