Make sure to read the FAQ on the (unofficial) heliumlabs.org website. The community also cross posts Team announcements there so you don't need to dig in Slack. Link to the mailing list can also be found there.

To cut a long story short: it seems priorities and goals shifted a couple of times in the 9 months since the OP was posted. From what I gather personally: the HLM team wants to come out guns blazing with a working product and real-life partnerships and use cases from day 1, rather than launch the chain and start looking for partnerships and application afterwards. This is the best way to go IMO if you want to develop a product that suits the needs of the industry you are targeting. It also means that launch has been pushed back from Q4 2017 to a (preliminary) Q1 2018 and deadlines were missed. This sucks if you want to get rid of your airdropped HLM tokens ASAP but it is good news if you were in this for the long run anyways.