What is the difference between IPO and ICO, and why do companies pick one over the other?

I love this topic. Being in crypto space for years, this is something i can share.

ICO is inital coin offering and this is very very different from IPO. ICO are mostly classified as utility tokens. What this mean is that by buying ICO, you does not entitled to any rights or shares of the company. It is just like buying vouchers from Sheng Siong or Capitaland mall, so that you can use these for purely purchases. In holding these tokens, you do not benefit from the share holders, so you would not receive any dividend. However, as the tokens does not pegged to any fixed value, it is prone to demand and supply. So the price of the tokens can x100 or x0.01. But at this point of time, there isnt real demand for most ICO as the company did not even have their own mainnet up or they yet to fully develop the protocol/ecosystem to utilize the token. I can go on a lot more to break down which tokens/coins have specialised function/exosystem that has huge potential but all these are projected values which is extremely high risk with mostly no logic/sense of backing it.
Having saying so many negative stuffs, I still love crypto as it has became the best payment methods for me. I trust crypto more than banks payments.

IPO is initial public offering for equities and bonds etc and is regulated whereas ICO is initial coin offering for cryptocurrencies and is not regulated.