The results of North Bridge Venture Partners 2009 Future of Open Source survey were released today at the Infoworld Open Source Business Conference. Michael Skok led a panel discussion on the topic with Dries Buytaert from Acquia, Ron Hovsepian from Novell, John Lilly from Mozilla, Martin Mickos from Sun, and John Roberts from SugarCRM.

Our friends at TopNotchThemes have built a second theme for Acquia Drupal, our distribution of Drupal, and we've released it as a project on Drupal.org.  Called Acquia Slate, it is a flexible, configurable Drupal theme with a somewhat corporate look and feel.

In what has become an annual tradition at the Open Source Business Conference, Michael Skok of North Bridge Venture Partners will host a keynote panel discussion on the Future of Open Source.

We recently launched free live webinars on acquia.com. Accessible by anyone, these live interactive webinars are typically scheduled on Thursdays at 1pm ET/10am PT/6pm GMT. This Thursday I have invited Ben Finklea from Volacci to present on SEO Best Practices for your Drupal Site.

Acquia is sponsoring and exhibiting at Web 2.0 Expo in New York City this week at the Javits Center. Free Expo Hall passes are available by registering at https://en.oreilly.com/webexny2008/public/register with the following code: webny08com. The Conference runs Tuesday through Friday.

MIT's Technology Review announced its annual TR35 honorees today - recognizing young innovators under the age of 35 whose inventions and research they find most exciting. Dries was honored along with 34 outstanding leaders in the field of technology - congrats Dries!

We recently received word that Acquia was named a AlwaysOn Global 250 Winner. Initially the AlwaysOn 100, this year marked the expansion of the list to 250 due to the "rapid growth of startup communities around the world." According to AlwaysOn, "this year's AO Global 250 reflects a set of trends that are about to ignite new market opportunities the whole world over."

Both Jeff and Kieran recently blogged about a new Forrester report entitled "Web Content Management and Open Source: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions," written by Stephen Powers, with Kyle McNabb and Shelby Catino.

Acquia has made this report available for download on acquia.com: http://acquia.com/forrester_WCM+open_source (registration required).

Today is an exciting day, as we launched the Acquia Podcast series this afternoon. You can listen to podcasts in a flash player on our site, subscribe via RSS feed, or find in iTunes.

Our first episode is an interview Robert Douglass and I did with David Mercer, author of the new book Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6.

Acquia's global conference tour continues on next week. Yesterday, Jeff participated yesterday in what was described by Kathleen Reidy at The 451 Group as a star-studded open source panel at Enterprise 2.0.