Only people in the know actually are aware that 500 million Bitshares end vesting in November 2016 due to the merger of Bitshares, Bitshares DNS, Bitshares Vote, AGS, and Protoshares (PTS). The rationale for the merger was to make 1 chain. This continual release of more Bitshares tokens has been a dampening factor in the Bitshares price since November 2014.
As this vesting period is about to end, it is thought by some Bitshares/Steem whales that there will be a huge rise in value in October in anticipation of the vesting period ending. Also these whales may try to push the price up even higher and this could be a sustained rise.
Also, there are rumors that Dan and Stan Larimer may revive development in Bitshares as they are now multimillionaires.
You may not be aware but there is life in Bitshares. An example is Ronny Boesing owner of CCEDK.com. He is rallying the global small business community through Chambers of Commerce all over the world to make User-Issued Assets (UIAs) on Bitshares. He has had some success bringing UIAs to the market for his own business and for other business owners. Examples of his UIAs are ICO OpenLedger (ICOO), BitTeaser (BTSR) and Openledger (OBITS).
ICO Openledger buys new coins in prelaunch that look promising and then sells them for a profit, here is a link for more information https://www.ccedk.com/dc/icoo . BitTeaser is a advertising network on the blockchain, here is a link for more information https://www.btsr.io/. Lastly he started openledger.info which is a decentralized exchange/wallet. Pretty much Poloniex.com and Blockchain.info in one.
UIAs that CCEDK.com helped bring to the market are HEAT Ledger ( http://heatledger.com/ ), and Solcert.
This time around there is a web wallet through Bitshares Munich ( http://www.bitshares-munich.de/#wallets ) . This wallet is also an App on Android called the "Smartcoins Wallet" which you can download here https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.bitsharesmunich.smartcoinswallet. In my opinion this was a biggest factor in why Bitshares did not take off when it was released, there were no wallets, Bitshares had to rely on outside exchanges which were getting hacked back then. A few months after Bitshares release Mtgox went down and took hundreds of millions with it.