Diveboard is the best online logbook that you can find today on the market. Packed with tons of features and a beautiful UI, integrated natively with most dive computers as well as with existing apps it’s one of the best way today to log and share your scuba experiences and discover now destinations.
I sat today with Alex Casassovici one of the guys behind Diveboard for a short peak behind the scene.
* Can you give up a quick overview about Diveboard and who you guys are ?
We started Diveboard as a personal project for Pascal and I (Alexander) out of a couple frustrations we’ve been having as scuba divers.
Logging our dives has been an important part of our training, used by our instructors as a way to recap what happened during the dive, introduce to basics of marine biology and discuss the physics of scuba. It’s always been a good way to get the dive site name’s spelled all right (some are really tricky).
Anyways as we got geared up with dive computers and cameras, we felt that urge to share our passion for scuba.
But nobody was there to make logging and sharing dives online in an easy way.
So we built it !
We started in 2011 and opened an alpha pretty quickly with the help of friends on design and testing and coded our way to the official opening in december 2012. Since the initial release the community has been hyperactive in asking for new features and stuff – and we’ve been busy delivering them as fast as we could !
We added support for more and more details to describe a dive, an activity feed to follow people or locations you’re interested in, grouping by trips, personal blog spaces… Check out the tour to get a better look at the service !
* What are the achievements you’re most proud of ?
Plenty ! I’m especially proud of the way Diveboard is evolving into a citizen science platform dedicated to monitoring the marine biotope. Since the very first days we’ve been working with DAN and EOL to collect physiological and species sightings from scuba divers and share them with universities for scientific purposes.
Pascal should be very proud of the way we integrated with the dive computers. Through our cross-platform plugin users can upload dive profiles straight from their dive computers to Diveboard without the need of the manufacturer’s software.
We also spent a lot of time on making sure pictures look awesome – as we were happy to see gorgeous photos landing on the gallery .
We also built the amazing explore to help scuba divers discover new destinations and see what others have experienced there.
With almost no marketing and only very positive word of mouth we managed to get over 40.000 dives logged, 17.000 pictures uploaded and the spot database passed the 25.000 mark making Divebaord by far the #1 online logbook around.
* Diveboard is totally free – what’s the catch ?
Well it’s true it’s almost totally free (you can actually purchase additional storage shouldn’t the free 500Mo/month be enough – but to be honest finding the purchase button to buy that additional storage may be a bit challenging 😉 ).
We added pretty early on spaces for professionals that they can personalise and where users can leave reviews (i.e check out Dive Shack USA‘s).
We’ll be rolling out in April new services for professionals, helping them market and sell their services online reaching out to new customers while keeping a tight bound with past customers – that’s how we intend to make a few bucks and keep Diveboard afloat.
We’ve taken a few strong stances as of what we want for diveboard : no billboards, free for the users (after all we want them to pour as much data as possible on the biotope and the scuba ecosystem to benefit their peers)
* What’s next for Diveboard?
We’ve been keeping an endless list of stuff we want to do. We opened recently an API enabling third parties to sync data with us and use Diveboard as a platform for sharing dives online. Divinglog was the first one to jump on this train and we are working with an handful of other awesome logbook makers following the same track.
Also there are still plenty stuff we’re frustrated about: the mobile app (which we opensourced) needs a lot of love, we have plenty ideas on how to improve the species identification tool and the explore page and of course we need to internationalize the site (this has been pending for a long time).
* With all this do you still have time to dive ?
Funny that you ask ! One of the reasons I started Diveboard was to dive more. I’ve actually been diving a bit more but still not as much as I’d like. Next stops should be Azores (Portugal) and Philippines during summer vacations – until then I’ll be surviving testing gear in the nearby dive pit. Being a scuba divers 3hrs away from any decent sea/ocean/quarry is indeed a bit frustrating ;).
Below are some screen shots of DiveBoard.com – You can also click here and check it out for yourself.
