What a disaster, such a great coin name gone to waste... This was a bad investment on my part, it's the first alt outside of LTC and BTC I invested in.
Looking back it's clear that the iCoin team did a lot of work and they really didn't get much support from the community, not sure if this was a result of the premine or the fact the community thought these people were getting payed huge salaries to work for iCoin. Perhaps they should of been more clear that they were helping iCoin but not part of a iCoin team. A team gets payed and if you not getting payed then you are just part of the community like everyone else in here is.
TeamiCoin, Viperbass and bigridg7 were extremely motivated and then something caused them to stop and it looks like it was after the conference and bigridg7 saying the premine was a big problem.
Very accurate observations Litesire. The conference really put things into perspective for myself that unless you're groundbreaking and innovative, there's not much of a market for hundreds of alt coins. A good name will not cut it. There was initially but only under the pretense that people could make short-term cash. We saw this with the alt coin rise a few months back (when all were increasing in value hundreds of percent in a period of a week). As someone who formerly completed some in-depth work for iCoin, I can tell you that the issues are still the same. The premine is now spent which is a fantastic start, but if no new users are there to realize there's a spent premine, no one will invest. iCoin needs a big announcement (big merchant, code update, etc..) and a nice fat press release, in addition to continuous merchant acquisition, but it's a catch-22 situation because no merchants will accept iCoin if they know they can't trade it effectively for BTC or fiat. Do the following in this order, and iCoin still has a fighting shot..
1. Get the effing website back up, what is this amateur hour?
2. Get on MintPal / Cryptsy (via votes or direct payment)
3. Release new update, bag a large merchant, or hold a charity event, etc.. worthy of a quality press release
4. PRweb press release and promote to MintPal / Cryptsy users
5. Continuous engagement on social media and continuous contact with new merchants