Ksso.net - Notes of a tech entrepreneur

Fighting the Vertical Video Syndrom

I believe vertical videos are one of the worst ideas ever. The field of view only captures meaningless details and do not match how your eyes work. The video below makes an excellent point about why vertical videos are bad. The only reason vertical videos exist is because it’s the most natural way to hold a phone while filming, and unfortunately that’s a fact. Holding a phone horizontally is obviously clumsy and unnatural. That being said there are solutions to solve this: Get phone manufacturers to rotate by 90…read more

360 Degree Video: Wait ‘Til It Really Comes Around

This post was initially posted on Mediapost Over the last few months there has been a lot of hype surrounding an immersive new type of video. Commonly referred to as virtual reality or spherical video, it allows the viewer to get a complete 360 degree view of an environment, and freely move their point of vision by tilting and turning their device. The buzz surrounding this trend is palpable — it feels like announcements of new 360 camera hardware, software, and videos come out of the woodwork on a daily…read more

Video as the next expression challenge

For those who know me, you know I have little talent when it comes to creating art. I’ve been working on it though, focusing on photography, learning techniques and applying recipes that definitely helped moving up the ladder from ugly memory-keeping pics to more elegant images that actually start conveying some level of emotion.Some of them can be seen on 500px.com and show that by following a couple rules you can create eye-candy pictures. Erasing time by Alexander Casassovici on 500px Recently I’ve been faced with a new challenge: sharing…read more

Entrepreneurship: Survival & Patience

I’ve attended LeWeb in Paris since the second edition back in 2005 – and year after year you get to reconnect with amazing people and update on their businesses. This year I was impressed by 2 of those entrepreneurs who launched their startup over 10 years ago, and kept it going despite the ups an downs, pivoted a few times until they finally got this year in a position where their product is a perfect fit for the market and their business is scaling at exponential speed. In Techcrunch or…read more

Citizen science project: Cosmic ray particle tracking

Posted by Alexander CASASSOVICI in citizen science

I am passionate about citizen science. I believe that crowdsoucing data and leveraging on a communauty not only helps understanding patterns and behaviors, but whenever possible we need to be able to tap on the crowd to gather data and support scientific purposes. i believe that people are only waiting for oportunities to get involved to make the world a better place – and simple actions brought at scale can have massive impacts. We did exactly that through Diveboard where species occurences identified by divers wordwide are published as open data for scientists to…read more

From Cybernetics to Discovery

Discovery has become one of our main area of interest at Diveboard. Of course discovery isn’t a new idea – helping someone stumble onto something that will get him excited has been on the mind of every marketer forever.What has changed greatly though is the means we can leverage on to get there. Discovery actually dates back from the 50s as a part of Cybernetics. For those like me who were born after that discipline stopped being taught, we may have a wrong idea about what cybernetics is. Cybernetics has…read more

Building an automated home with z-wave in 2014

Ah home automation – what an overworked subject. It’s been hot (or not) for 20 years … Truth is home automation needs to be shelved as a meaningless buzzword encompassing way too many ideas. As we just bought a new home, I was faced with the challenge of dealing with rewiring it so it matches today’s electrical standards (which is a very versatile concept). Fact is wiring a home is a nightmare. You need to figure out early one which switch connects to which plug and engrave it deeply into you…read more

Is Google Glass dead !?

I’ve been a glass explorer for 6 months now. I often get asked “what is Glass good for?” Let’s face it: there is no good answer to that question. Glass is obviously a platform to explore wearable and hands-free computing. From that prospective the platform is mostly up to the challenge. After 6 months in the field the platform is falling short of killer apps that would justify wearing glasses rather that pulling out a phone Turn-by-turn direction is probably the only app that really gets advantage of the platform,…read more

SEO, how you have changed !

I had lately a couple discussions which made me realize there are loads of misconceptions about SEO. SEO used to be magic. Some guys with a magic wand would be able to boos your ratings to Google top result list by tweaking a few tags here in there in your pages. Some dark wizards pretending to wield such powers still roam the web but let’s face it : they have largely become extinct – or at least have evolved as provider of best practices to improve your site as SEO…read more

2 weeks in #Glass

It’s been 2 weeks since I got into the Google #glass explorer program – and I’ve tried to wear those tangerine 2.0 glasses as much as I could ever since I got a hold on them. Firstly: why did I get them ? You may have missed that side of my personal history but I did work on a virtual reality project called VR-WEAR some 5 years+ ago. While the project which was very much like the Occulus rift but pre-kickstarter did not get funded at that time (just after…read more