Adam Back and Austin Hill announced on Let’s Talk Bitcoin their newest project: “sidechains”. The idea, they described, would allow for the existence of alternative blockchains, perhaps with different rules allowing various kinds of additional features or transaction types, but with a currency unit whose value is pegged to that of the bitcoin.
One of the more interesting alternative cryptocurrencies to have come out of the dungeon that is the Bitcointalk altcoin forum is something called “Quark”...