Subdivision surfaces
A type of cross between polygons and nurbs, these new surface representations are becoming extremely popular.  Using wavelets, surfaces can be represented continuously for such operations as smooth level-of-detail transitions, multi-resolution editing, and controllable creasing.  The Pixar short, Geri's game, was done using subdivision surfaces.

DSO capability
An extremely useful new feature is the ability to write C/C++ functions as dynamic shared objects.  These DSO's are read in by the renderer when called.  With this feature, developers are no longer restricted by the interpreted shading language.

New Types (Vector, Normal, Hpoint, Matrix)

Multi-segment motion blur (piecewise linear segments)

Point primitives

Curve primitives

Message passing
Shaders can look at other shader's attributes and parameters using a type of blackboard communication scheme (one shader posts information to the board, other shaders can retrieve information about that shader from the board).

Pixar Renderman with Blue Moon Toolkit
The author of Blue Moon Rendering Toolkit (BMRT), Larry Gritz, showed an interesting technique to use both renderers in a common scene.  BMRT can be used to render elements when called from the Pixar renderer.  In this way, BMRT can be used to reflect, refract, shadow with ray-casting, or other techniques not implemented by the Pixar Renderman implementation.
 

Other Notes
New version (3.8) of Renderman Toolkit 3.8 - 1st, 2nd week of August

In development of new Visual Shader Debugger for more effective shader development
 
 

Alias Maya to Renderman integration (MTOR)
This integration is "tighter" than ever before and as a plug-in to the Maya system offers more functionality from Renderman in an existing Alias Maya scene.  Renderman shaders are easily attached to Maya elements and other Renderman tools such as the distributed render manager (Alfred) are coupled to allow for a seamless working session.  In this way, Maya can be used or modeling and animation while Renderman and shaders can provide the rendering.