A couple of major product updates in big data crossed the wire last week, along with highlights from Splunk’s annual conference and word of a new project called The Human Face of Big Data, which couples analytics with crowdsourcing.

First up, EMC unveiled a partnership Alpine Data Labs. Alpine will integrate its cloud-based predictive analytics platform with Greenplum to create an off-the-shelf, easy-to-use platform that’s being touted as an ‘in-database’ solution.

The second development comes from HortonWorks, which rolled out version 1.1 of its Hadoop distribution a few days ago. The latest release is supposedly enterprise ready thanks to high-availability on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and an add-on that improves reliability in other departments.  Hortonworks Data Platform 1.1 is integrated with Apache Flume as well. It features speedier read/writes and faster MapReduce execution, and comes with a panel that admins can use to monitor third party services. The whole thing is built on top of Apache Hadoop 1.0, the most stable version of the file system currently out.

Another big highlight from last week was Splunk’s annual user conference, which SIliconANGLE covered with a live broadcast stream.  One of the experts that stopped by theCube during the gathering was Stefan Wieczorek, the CEO Brazilian service provider that bases its entire portfolio around the platform. He said that often locating the data is often, and the main difficulty in implementing a big data strategy is the knowledge gap that most companies have not yet bridged.

While Stefan Wieczorek and his firm help enterprise understand big data, Against All Odds Productions is working on a much broader project. The Human Face of Big Data is a crowdsourced initiative that will aim to gauge the way people interact with data in their every-day lives, and it will do so on a massive scale.