The Sins of a Solar Empire Website has a link to an Impulse Phase 2 Preview looking at the next version of Stardock's distribution platform. The update also gives mid-September as the tentative release date for the final version 1.1 patch for Sins of a Solar Empire that's currently undergoing beta testing (story). Here's the dope:

In June we launched our next-generation digital distribution platform, Impulse. And in July, we released the beta of the mega update to Sins of a Solar Empire that Ironclad has been working long and hard on. There's been a lot of talk about Impulse (pro and con) since then.

Our tentative date for the final version of Sins of a Solar Empire v1.1 is mid September. We want to have plenty of time to address your feedback and Ironclad has been doing a great job in implementing features and adding content to the game (feel free to give the Ironclad team some kudos in the forums, they'd love to hear some positive feedback on this free, huge, update).

One of the big goals of Sins v1.1 is to greatly ease on-line play in terms of connectivity. This is something we're working on with Impulse which will support game-listing, achievements, rankings, and the rest and allow developers to query this data and display in game.