This week a company launched a new big data-centric development platform, four others announced strategic partnerships to develop Hadoop offerings, and one lucky social media startup managed to catch the eye of VCs.

First in this recap is the update from Lucid, which combined Hadoop with open source search technology to create a platform that facilitates the development of a new breed of apps: those that harness both unstructured and structured data. The solution is currently in beta and covers a number of different areas that add more value to the core concept.

Moving on to Zettaset, the company partnered up with a manufacturer of custom servers this week to bring its vision of a Hadoop appliance to life. It combines the analytics engine and Zettaset’s management platform on top of Red Hat’s commercial Linux distro.

Hortonworks also had some news this week. The much hyped-about big data crew spun off from Yahoo’s initial Hadoop team is collaborating with Kognitio to bring in-memory processing to Hadoop: Kognitio’s database technology will make use of the parallel processing to speed things up even further, all via a connector that will be developed the two companies.

The final update takes us out of Hadoop territory to marketing 2.0. Umbel is an emerging player in social media that focuses on analyzing and identifying trends in user behavior, in an effort to help advertisers better target their given audiences.

Fresh out of a $3.6 million funding round Umbel brought a new all-star exec aboard to lead the charge of customer relations – working between the media buyers and sellers that make use of Umbel’s solution.  Amy Bickers is now Director of Agency Solutions, bringing with her over 20 years of experience in this industry.