Weak hands are weak.
Everybody buy while they're cheap!
There is heavy price manipulation towards the downtrend on both Mintpal and Cryptsy. Basically, people with money are doing what they can to gain ownership of a large percentage of Mintcoins by suppressing the price beyond the limits of the current buy support. They can also profit while doing this.
Example. I start with 30 BTC.
I find a coin that has a stable price and currently needs low volume buy support.
1. Buy 10 BTC worth of Mintcoin at the lowest available price.
2. Place a series of small buy walls 1-3 BTC each leading up to current price. (example: 3 BTC buy order at 10 satoshi, 1.5 BTC buy order at 9 satoshi, 1 BTC buy order at 8 satoshi...)
3. Place several 5 BTC sell walls up with the MINT you bought. (Example continuing from above: I would put two sell orders of Mintcoins worth 5BTC for each sell order. I would place them at 12 and 11 Sats.)
This will cause impatient people to want to jump over your 5 BTC sell walls so they can just get rid of their coins and not wait for buyers to eat through the sell walls. So they sell to the whale at 10 Satoshis. The whale then takes his new Mintcoin, and puts them up at 11 satoshis. He then waits for buyers to eat into the coins he just flipped, and uses profits to pad his buy orders at a lower satoshi price. This way, as long as more people are selling than buying, he constantly gets a fresh supply of mint to keep the sell walls up so that buyers never eat through them.
In the above scenario, since there is less buy support than sell pressure, the coin price slowly goes down. The whale then moves all his buy orders down to the next satoshi and repeats the process.
The only way to combat this is to create enough buy support to overcome sell pressure. That will happen through development milestones (android wallet, Mintcoin fund adverts, etc.), word of mouth/natural increased awareness, marketing efforts, and as general public and world-wide awareness of crypto currencies increases.
What coins will they buy when they become aware of the usefulness of the coins? The goal is to make sure MINTCOIN has a shot at being a first-draft pick so to speak. Mintcoin has many attractive qualities that could very well make it a viable currency/store of value for any number of countries, causes, etc. I see real potential for mass adoption over time.
One thing is always certain when it comes to selling a product to new customers: you have to sell to their interests, or they will look you over and choose the next product that does. I believe that as long as people keep plugging away at creating awareness, innovating whenever possible, and continuing to foster and further a truly positive, vibrant community that reflects the perceived value of Mintcoin as something other than just another useless crypto-coin, then the coin will succeed.
I think the android wallet is huge. It is important for all investors that once we have a working app in hand, we spread the news and links far and wide as possible. Also, that would be an excellent time to fill mint faucets and have some give-aways and photoshop contests and such.