There's just 14 days of the Soma ICO left, they've already sold an impressive 6.4 million tokens. Their website can be found here:
https://soma.co/token-sale/

What is Soma

Soma is short for 'The Social Market', they're a new decentralized social marketplace that's launched on the blockchain. The new platform uses their SCT token to reward users to provide an incentive for them to use the platform more.
The new platform has many features that you'd expect with a social media platform (liking etc) but they're also an online marketplace.
Using smart contracts the new platform aims to provide trust with all transactions being verifiable on the blockchain. This should allow users to safely trade their items.
The new SCT token is an ERC20 token that will be used to reward users with the goal of increasing activity and user retention.
The new platform also has a patent-pending feature, the 'interactive item card' (IIC). The new IIC feature will transfer important information in transactions on the platform.

Target Market

The rise of online selling platforms over the last 10-15 years has been huge. Ebay lead the way for years and recently have been overtaken by Amazon.
Soma feel that the main problem with the current platforms is that users can hide away behind their usernames. This means that there's no social element to the platform, Soma aim to change this by combining social media with an online selling platform.
In their Whitepaper they state that they'll be the first marketplace to reward its users. This should increase user retention and also generate advertising for the platform.

Payment options

At the start of launch Soma will accept multiple forms of payment, bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies and FIAT currency. Using the platform will be made easy for its users, initially prices will be displayed in FIAT so that users can easily understand the price. There will be many different options to upload money to the platform including paypal, however each payment on the platform will be processed with cryptocurrency.
As the platform attracts more users they hope that a lot of users will start making payments with their SCT token. Using the SCT token will make purchases cheaper for users by removing transaction costs, this should have aid adoption of the new currency.

Secure payments

The new platform will use an Escrow service to hold payments to make sure that all transactions go smoothly. Due to the new platform being decentralized transaction costs will be able to kept low.
The platform will use an arbiter system, arbiters will act as trusted 3rd party for each transaction made between buyer and seller. The arbiter will receive a pre defined payment. Once each transaction has been complete all 3 parties will be able to rate eachother which can then be viewed by users for any future transactions they try to take part in.

The Interactive Item Card

Another of the platforms innovations will be the 'Interactive Item Card', users will be able to increase the value of their published IIC's by increasing their social acceptance on the platform.
This will motivate users to produce high quality content on the platform as they'll be rewarded for it.

Roadmap

• Q3 2016: Development of the project began.

• Q4 2016: First funding secured.

• Q1 2017: Raised $1.5 million from angel investors.

• Q3 2017: ICO and closed alpha release.

• Q4 2017: Closed beta release and technical Whitepaper released.

• Q1 2018: Open beta released.

• Q2 2018: MVP release.

Soma ICO Details

• Total token supply: 60,000,000

• 54,000,000 distributed during the ICO

• 6,000,000 tokens used for additional marketing and for the founding team

• Maximum cap: 120,000 ETH

Conclusion

The platform has already raised a large amount of funds. Rewarding users on a selling platform is a fairly unique idea, it will be interesting to see it works out.
According to their whitepaper they plan to launch in a new country for every 1500 ETH raised which is going to be a massive task.

Website: https://soma.co/token-sale/
Whitepaper: https://soma.co/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Whitepaper-1.pdf