During his presentation at J and Beyond 2011, developer and designer Stian Didriksen announced that he has partnered with Joomla template and extensions developer RocketTheme.
RocketTheme will be using NinjaBoard as their forum solution of choice for future templates.
Currently, the template developer is using phpbb3. The collaboration between Stian and RocketTheme will improve the feature-set of NinjaBoard and I could tell Stian was excited of the possibilities.
RocketTheme will sponsor development of NinjaBoard for a year and have put a significant amount of money on the table for that to happen.
Stian is a young developer based in Molde, Norway. He's involved with Nooku, NinjaBoard and Prothemer, and a real code wizard. During J and Beyond 2011, he won the J.O.S.C.A.R.S 'Code Junkie' Award, sharing it with Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos from Akeeba Backup.
I'm looking forward to seeing where this will take NinjaBoard - and it seemed the crowd at J and Beyond agreed.