Congrats to Acquia

On my way home from Foo Camp last summer I was lucky enough to get a ride back with Dries Buytaert and others. The entire trip home was spent discussing how and when Dries could take Drupal commercial, and the various business models that could support the Drupal development effort. Like other Open Source projects the issues are tricky and subtle but Dries seems to have solved those problems and announced today a MONSTER $7M round of funding, from among others, O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures for his new firm Acquia, designed to capture to commercial value of the Drupal project.

Dries was impressive at Foo Camp and I'm excited to see what plans he has for Drupal, both in the near term and the long term.

Chicago Ignite

If you read this blog, and live in or near Chicago, then you'll want to be at the Ignite- Chicago I'm hosting with Sean Harper tomorrow. You can read more about it on our blog: http://ignite-chicago.org/ or on upcoming: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/309951/

We've got a really great list of speakers that I'm in awe of, and I think if you can brave the cold weather you'll have a good time.

Harper Reed

Jason Fried

Erin McKean

Keith Schacht - something about Facebook Apps or Google’s OpenSocial

Mark Roth - something about Local Media

Justin Kruger - Using your graphics processor for scientific computing or something on Prize Economics and innovation

Derek Wade - Scrum

Leon Chism

Brawley Reishman - Building your web application with offshore labor

Jason Rexilius

Matt McCall

Massimo DiPierro - Gluon Web Framework

Paul Caswell - Thinking Together

John Pasky - Protecting your IP in 5 minutes

Sean Blanton - Using Perl to Control Java

Ravi Shankar - “Innovating Process, Methods and Tools for the Web 2.0 World” or “AJAX Frameworks and Tool kits - When to use what, for building your Rich Internet application”