Inspiration & aspiration
Diviac, which stands for
Dive Maniac
as you might have guessed, was launched in November 2013 but has been an
idea in the making for a number of years. Two defining moments led to its
inception: the first was when our founder, Joel lost his old logbook containing
all the memories of his first dives on the Great Barrier Reef, in New Zealand
and across South-East Asia. A tragedy… gone, forever! The second trigger
was Joel’s family trip to China and the Philippines in the spring of 2012.
Having set off with a backpack and an iPad (just in case), he was shocked
by the ubiquity of wifi connections even in the most remote villages in
Asia. The changing traveler habits, which now involve taking a laptop,
a tablet or at least a smartphone on holiday, was equally an eye opener.
The time was ripe to reinvent the scuba diving logbook for the digital
age!
From the start, our mission was not only to digitize the traditional paper
version, but rather to rethink the whole purpose of a logbook and to create
a service that would truly delight our users (there are enough poorly designed
scuba websites out there).
The main objectives we set ourselves in building diviac were the following:
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Focus on ease of use, simplicity and beauty
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See the logbook as a journal, a place where rich memories are recorded
and displayed in a attractive way (and not just technical facts)
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Allow each individual to customize what he logs and who can see it
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Make it social and make it easy for everyone to share their experiences
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Leverage the benefits of a cloud based web-application: universal accessibility,
device neutrality, instant syncing (no cables) and the power of user generated
content (think Wikipedia…)
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Provide a rich marine life database, which is informative, inspiring and
consumer centric
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Provide “intelligence” to the functionalities by leveraging user geo-positioning data
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Offer full connectivity to the dive computers that offer a PC link
We are proud of the results and believe that we have reached our goals.
Your opinion though, is what counts at the end of the day, so we can’t
wait to hear your feedback and get your inputs for improvements.
Team
-
Joel Perrenoud
Founder, CEO
Joel is a passionate traveler and scuba diver who has explored the underwater
world in 15 countries and 5 continents (but doesn’t intend to stop there).
He’s also fascinated by all things digital and can’t remember how the world
went around before the Internet. Prior to founding diviac, Joel led the
European business of Korn/Ferry Futurestep, a global provider of talent
management solutions. Before that he held various global management roles
at Adecco, a global staffing company, and was an investment manager at
Jacobs Holding AG, a family owned private equity firm. Joel also spent
a number of years doing high-tech work while working at McKinsey & Co in
San Francisco and at Compaq Computers in Switzerland. Joel holds a MA in
Economics from the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland and the Freie Universität
Berlin, Germany, as well as an MBA with honors from Harvard Business School.
-
Thomas Achhorner
Founder, COO
Thomas is fond of scuba diving, sailing, cycling and many other outdoor activities. He is a certified Divemaster and has explored reefs, wrecks, caves and frozen lakes around the world. Thomas shares Joel's fascination with digital devices and how they are transforming our lives. He started his career at IBM in Switzerland where he trained as a systems engineer, solution architect and project manager. He then joined The Boston Consulting Group where he spent over 19 years and worked in the firm's Zurich, Sydney, Hong Kong and Beijing offices. He founded BCG's IT advisory practices in South East Asia and Greater China and, for the last six years, ran the Swiss IT practice. His focus was on advising companies on IT strategy and digital business models. Thomas holds an MSc, summa cum laude, in computer science with minors in business administration from the Swiss Institute of Technology ('ETH') in Zurich.
-
Yves Perrenoud
Technology
Yves brings 15 years of software development, security, system and networking
experience with him. He previously worked for Bloomspot in San Francisco,
where he was one of the early members of the engineering team. Prior to
that, he helped start Convirture, which offers management solutions for
private and public cloud infrastructure. He was a product manager at nCircle
and Oracle, designed network management solutions for Digital Island and
managed large-scale Unix server infrastructures for Cisco Systems and Silicon
Graphics. Yves holds an ETS Engineering degree in Microengineering from
the Ecole d'Ingénieurs du Canton de Neuchâtel in Switzerland.
Talk to us!
If you have some questions that weren't answered in the
FAQ,
want to report a bug or have an idea for a new feature, this is the email to use:
support@diviac.com
We don't provide telephone support at this time, but will get back to you in a flash.
We look forward to hearing from you.
The diviac team
