i read a mention earlier that we need people to buy things with devcoin, and was tempted to point out right there that actually a lot seems to depend on WHAT people buy, or maybe on WHERE/HOW they buy it.
I don't see how it is relevant. What matters is supply and demand, and for trading it means how much time coins spend in wallets of merchants and their customers. Higher velocity means lower demand.
So if you want a boost to market cap, you need a kind of a project which freezes coins it gets... A perfect example would be a kind of forum which requires you to destroy some amount of Devcoins to prove that you aren't a scammer.
It is possible to approach this on cryptocurrency design level: since permainflationary alt-coins like Devcoin do not depend on fees, you can make it so fees are destroyed when transaction is made.
Higher number of transaction means that that more devcoins are destroyed... And if there is some trade, in the long term you get a situation where amount of coins which are mined approximately equals to amount which is destroyed.
Then, say, if you make transaction fee equal to 1% of transaction, you get 1% of total trading volume in economy for bounties and miners.
Freicoin's demurrage does something similar, but they got it backwards: currently they starve miners through obligatory donations to foundation, but in a long run miners will get 5% of total trade volume, which is just insane if total trading volume is high. (And foundation gets nothing.) It shouldn't be called Freicoin, it should be called MinerCoin.