1. No major news in the field of truly formal proof-of-stake description. It's the question of months at least probably(btw, good formal framework describing proof-of-work appeared only in second half of 2014, 5+ years after Nakamoto's paper which is pretty informal).

2. Just made pre-announcement https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1060567


P.S. Communicating with the awesome guy Bill regularly




Nope. And Nxt will got some evolutional improvements, not radical. as radical changes seems to be not much needed at all. Qora's algo needs for some other improvements, I would like not to disclose the details here though.