The first two NEO ICOs are Red Pulse and ALIS Media. The City of Zion team is working on porting various dAPPs from the Ethereum platform onto NEO (among other matters). The NEO core developers are working on providing support for more programming languages for the NEO platform, so that it will become increasingly easy to deploy dAPPs onto NEO. I believe the NEO course on how to create smart contracts is also being translated from Chinese into English. Personally I hope the next international visit of Da Hongfei and Eric Zhang will be to South Korea and after that Singapore would seem like a good location to me. Elastos will develop an operating system on which NEO can run securely (which negates hacking, phishing and other security threats). The NEO's team primary focus at the moment is the development of its ecology and in that ecology developers play a most important role. NEO will also be listed on 2 of the 3 main exchanges in Japan (might be near the end of September), an Indian exchange just added NEO and a lot of other exchanges across the globe will want to add it now that it is a top 10 blockchain with massive volume ($523 million in the last 24 hours). The NEO team is also working on decentralising the network more, but I believe the support for more programming languages takes precedence for now. New NEO wallets are also in development including hardware wallets.

The reason for the price surge is that NEO is a first class platform and people start to realise that NEO can easily solve various issues that most other blockchains struggle with such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. It has a proper concensum mechanism, supports a broad array of programming languages, will have the ability for cross-chain integration, will become proof against quantum computing, can reach thousand transactions per second now and in optimised state even 10,000, whilst Bitcoin and Ethereum will have to compromise on security to reach a fraction of that and NEO is by far the most energy efficient blockchain. Besides that NEO will enjoy far greater support in China than any other blockchain which is quickly becoming the greatest economic powerhouse in the world which will only be further enhanced by the NEO blockchain. I found the following SAP article rather insightful on the future of blockchain technology: https://www.sap.com/trends/blockchain.html#solutions

According to SAP 10% of the value of the GDP will be stored on blockchain by 2027.

In the beginning of March 2017 Ethereum had a market cap similar to what NEO now has, so personally I would not underestimate how quickly the further deployment of the NEO blockchain can take place and as more experience has been acquired along the way, the potential could be there to do this even quicker now. From what I have seen the founders of NEO will however not compromise the quality of the blockchain for speed. They genuinely want to create the best smart economy platform the world has ever seen (although they are too humble to state it like that).