As always, this past week has been packed with significant developments from several companies looking to monetize all the demand surrounding the cloud. Amazon Web Services is currently one of the largest players in this space, and is paying close attention to the rapidly growing big data trend.

Around the time Yahoo announced its Hadoop team has been separated from the company to create the new Hadoop services startup Hortonworks, AWS announced its latest price cut in a competitive effort that has been going on for about two years now. Inbound data transfer is now free for AWS customers, and the price tag on outbound data transfer shrunk by 20 percent from 15 cents per GB to 12 cents per GB.

PostgreSQL-based open-source database developer EnterpriseDB is also looking to expand its market, and cost efficiency has always proven itself to be a wonder way to attract keeps.  The company launched Postgres Advanced Server 9.0, which can reportedly deliver cost savings of 80 percent in comparison to commercial alternatives.

A bit closer on the consumer side of the cloud, VMware has been working on an Android version of its popular Zimbra collaboration software. The free VMware Zimbra for Android or VZA is currently more of a pet project than an actual product, but it may become one in the future.

This week, the personal cloud got some attention as well. Dell, which also launched a new ad campaign, seeks to regain itself a name among the consumer tech industry’s top players. The launch of the latest version of its Stage personal cloud storage service is a part of this effort: users can capture  and automatically upload media using Stage-enabled devices, and then view it from their PC. The personal cloud is on the rise, and at the same time so are security concerns. Dropbox’s  revamped TOS is the latest example of that.