I just released a pretty good overview about APPICS. I will try to answer the question why they need to have their own token. The reason is they will serve a certain community of people/influencers which focus will be on Video, Picture and Promotion content. They want to be an independent brand with its own ecosystem. Therefore they need there own token and Application which runs on the Steem-Blockchain. We as Steem-Users will profit when APPICS goes Viral and they will need to keep a lot of Steempower in there Account in order to let there App run smoothly - this has to do with Bandwith power that depends on your Steempower. So as more people join APPICS they need more Steempower to run the App a perfect win-win situation. You can still join their bounty program to earn some free XRP tokens.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@masterthematrix/lets-talk-about-appics-news-update-the-first-official-smart-media-project-for-the-steem-blockchain
Thank you for sharing. I don’t understand the business model. How are they going to create demand for the token and revenue.
I think in the current situation where Steemit.com is serving, more bad than good, a general blogging experience to all different kind of users, is not going to be the best way to go. We need more specific communities that care about the content that users really want to see. So by building specific applications like APPICS allows users who are just interested in "soft content" to have there own platform with there own rules and economics. Actually, all projects like dtube, dsound, utopian...are serving a special kind of content and therefore could also create their own SMT token in the future. The big difference with APPICS in my opinion, is the feature that they will have moderators on each topic e.g. lifestyle, tech, health... and these moderators will influence the visibility of the trending pages on these categories. The moderators will be voted by the community/users for a certain time period. That all being said it is still early stage for APPICS, and their community has to be built yet. Anyhow, I think the marketcap of the current ICO is kind of attractive if you consider that they will probably sell tokens worth around 8-12 mio. usd.
All of what u are saying is nice and sweet, but has nothing to do with a business model.
Ok, one last try - the business model is the same as with Steemit. Get paid for your content, voting and commenting. That is the basis because we are in the decentralized blockchain industry there is not going to be a traditional business model in terms of how much profit do they make or what kind of assets do they hold on their balance sheet. That is not relevant for a development Team like APPICS, the only thing they care is the network effect of how many users will join their platform and use their XAP Tokens. The only "real" value all these tokens have is how many users are actually using the coin, and is there a growing network effect. So the mission for APPICS is to build an easy to use APP where Users can build and create their own Social Media business.
Let me just ask you, what do you think is the business model of Steemit.com (not Steem the Blockchain) why are you here? and why do you see any value in Steem-Token?