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Providing adequate software and tools for researchers has always been of great importance to organizations, but has often come at a great cost. In an era of constantly evolving technology and rapidly dwindling budgets, my IT team has had to work with a large pool of researchers to provide cost-effective solutions that meet the ever-growing demand for innovation and computing power.

I am an Information Technologist for the Department of Statistics and Probability at Michigan State University. The Department is home to award-winning faculty with a wide variety of expertise in fundamental and interdisciplinary research, and over 100 graduate students from all over the world. Keeping the faculty and students ahead of their research is a constantly evolving challenge for my team and I.

Looking for innovative ways to use R, the Big Data open source analytics language? Then take a gander at the two top winners of the first of a series of contests that R's corporate caretaker Revolution Analytics has produced. The winners, announced today, receive prizes that range from $1,000 to $10,000 for their submissions. It is an interesting collection and shows off the power of the language itself.

Troy Thibodeaux is the Editor for Newsroom Innovation at the Associated Press and has written a terrific post on resources for data journalists. Now, you probably aren't a journalist, but you should pay attention anyway, since there are plenty of things you can do to manipulate data in interesting ways for your management and others who are far less technical than yourself. Take a look at that piece, and connect that with what Jason Hiner at TechRepublic wrote last month and you will see a potential job opportunity.

Revolution Analytics, the enterprise face of R software, announced today that it will deliver R analytics on Cloudera and other Hadoop installations, The service is called RevoConnectR for Apache Hadoop. It is a collection of open-source packages that allows R programmers to access Hadoop HDFS and HBASE data stores in Apache Hadoop directly from R and write MapReduce jobs with R.

The packages are now available to download for free from the RHadoop Project on GitHub and will be commercially supported for Apache Hadoop with Revolution R Enterprise 5.0 Server for Linux. "R users can now leverage advanced analytics and data stored in Apache Hadoop to tap into more multifaceted dimensions of their data," said Norman Nie, CEO of Revolution Analytics.

The explosion of big data has caused far-reaching ripples in the enterprise. Organizations today are faced with unprecedented challenges in sorting, processing and analyzing their data, which has in turn given rise to a new generation of technologies.

One such example is the R statistics language, which was originally developed by noted statisticians Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka at the University of New Zealand in 1997. In recent years, R has emerged as a popular language for advanced analytics, and is also central to the emerging data science movement.

The R Programming book on Wikibooks is seeking contributors.

If you're an R programmer looking for a way to give back to the community, this could be a good project for you.

Opani is a cloud platform for analyzing large data sets. The idea is that you upload your data and then Opani helps you determine how many servers you need to process the data in the timeframe you specify. It then spins up the servers and automatically winds them down when the job is done. You can then download the results, or share them on the Opani Gallery. Opani runs on Rackspace's infrastructure and supports tools such as R, Octave, Matlab and Python.

There are free plans for public projects. Rates for private projects vary.

Revolution Analytics just released a new version of its suite of R-based statistical analysis tools Revolution R Enterprise 4.3. Significant new features include the ability to import data files from SPSS, a new predictive analytics algorithm for big data and an installer for Windows. Revolution R already supported importing from SAS files.

The new version is still free for academics, or for those participating in Kaggle data science competitions.

Since data scientists Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden (disclosure: Pete writes for ReadWriteWeb) presented information about how iPhones store a log of your location data in an unencrypted file, there's been a mix of reactions. Some are outraged by the privacy implications. Some don't see why it's a big deal, citing either the forensic community's prior knowledge of the logs or the fact that many people share location information on Foursquare. Others have been intrigued at the possibilities of exploring their own personal location information.

Today Revolution Analytics announced a partnership with Kaggle to provide Revolution R Enterprise software for free to participants in Kaggle's data contests. Competitors can download the software here.

Revolution is a company that provides commercial support and tools for the statistical programming language R (see our previous coverage). Kaggle hosts data analysis competitions for organizations such as such as Deloitte, NASA, Wikipedia and The Heritage Health Network.