Devs cancelled the first IPO in order to work on details and come up with a decent IPO plan. Instead they've just started IPO with no info whatsoever. Maidsafe investors got about 20000 coins for 1 BTC, devs set a cap but still investors are pretty much fucked. Ethereum devs only offer 2000 for 1 BTC, didn't set a cap, didn't post any info about total amount of coins, mining plan, devs stake ect. Looks like another big disappointment: eMunie, Maidsafe, Ethereum.
You'll be then pleased to hear there is no IPO. To quote Joseph:
"
Our sale is structured differently from sales or fundraising events conducted by other groups in the space. We are not conducting an IPO. We are not selling shares in anything. Ether (ETH), the product we are selling, has no voting or any other kind of rights and does not entitle anyone to dividends or any sort of future gains.
Ether is a necessary element -- a fuel -- for operating the computational "appliance" we are building. Without the requirement of payment of ether for every computational step and storage operation of the system, infinite loops or excessive storage demands could bog down the system and effectively destroy it.
People can download the software appliance and run it on their computers and it will do certain basic things like perhaps showing them a catalog of available apps. If they want more functionality, like running a DApp or uploading and testing DApps that they have written, they will have to feed fuel into the machine.
Under Swiss law, where Ethereum Switzerland GmbH is based, the product we are selling is classified as a software product. And we are conducting a pre-sale for this product since we are not yet able to manufacture it.
People who are interested in acquiring it to build and upload DApps or to pay for their usage of DApps are enabled in the pre-sale to buy ETH for BTC and lock in their supply of it at a known price. These sales will help us to fund the continued construction of the software platform (the computational appliance) that requires ETH and that will continually create ETH starting at the moment the genesis block is released. Once the initial batch of ETH is created in the genesis block and ready for delivery, people who have purchased some in the pre-sale will be able to claim their product."
As for information, there are 5 pdf documents that in excruciating details explain everything about what we are doing, what we've done, and what we are planning to do.