Thanks for the mention. I was happy for the new Ripple project because it is a good implementation of my original vision for an open, decentralized payment network. Now there's a fork called Stellar, which uses the same software, and so is also a good implementation of the original vision. The difference between Ripple and Stellar at this point is down to distribution strategy for the underlying cryptocurrency of their platforms, which, from my perspective, is just an implementation detail. I'm just happy to see smart, motivated people working on this.

For anyone who's interested in the earlier stuff:

http://archive.ripple-project.org/