Everything around us is getting smarter in this tech-era, starting from our phones, glasses, TVs, watch, and even home, except few things waiting for their way to join the club. And here is now calculator added to the list of ‘smart tech’, as three Indians innovated a ‘Smart Calculator’, which by them is specially made for shopkeepers’ accounts.
Handling accounts, sales, expenses for MSMEs and local shops is really a hectic task at the end of the day, that’s often time consuming and brain-tweaking.
When the co-founder of this Indian Startup encountered the same problem when he met a shopkeeper lady, who used to calculate the amount of sales on the calculator, write it on the paper and verifying the sales with amount earned using calculator at the end of the day, which is normally every small shop owner do, he thought of adding value to the shop owners by simplifying the task.
“Calculators have a basic use case but we can do a lot of things on top of the calculation part, which is where we think the smart calculator will be a really good tool for the shopkeepers” said Praveen Mishra while kicking off the process he did, upgrading calculator to be smart.
Smart Calculator
Three young Indians – Praveen Mishra from Uttar Pradesh, Satyam Sahu and Shanmuga Vadival started ‘ToHands’ in 2017, with each taking the role of product side of the busieness, software and apps, and hardware respectively.
Mishra after acknowledging the usual accounts method of small business owners and the inefficacy of expense mobile apps, as they aren’t handy enough when simultaneously treating the customer, the team decided to go for a smart calculator that would take the jobs. “The backbone of small business in India is still a calculator” he said.
At age 21, Mishra innovated the idea by developing the first version of ‘smart calculator’ which was a Raspberry Pi-powered prototype of a device, featuring a keyboard and two buttons – one for credit and one for debit.
With this, they approached local shopkeepers and introduced the concept of the device successfully, that gained them seven pre-orders. But then, Mishra and team worked on to furnish the device with version-two of smartness, which seemed to be a more-polished one.
Specs and Price of the Calculator
After getting selected at T-hub, an incubation centre for IT Startups at Raidurgam in Hyderabad, Mishra and team took another shot at hardware and levelled up the design, going for the third or final version.
Likely as the regular calculator, the smart one too performs the same calculations with the difference that these calculations can be recorded in a mobile app. The connected calculator supports Wi-Fi and 16MB built-in memory, which can store 5 million transactions. The smart-calci takes a 2400mAh rechargeable battery and a USB-C port for charging.
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The team had raised 50 lakhs as of October 2022, via the T-hub for scaling the business. Currently the Startup plans to build 2000 units per month and gradually expand it to 1 lakh units by next year.
With number of Startups targeting only on software these days, it’s been quite a while for hardware-based Startup that fetches out every day usable product.
The final version of the smart-calculator is now available for everyone to pre-order in their website at the price of ₹3,000, with 1 year warranty.
(For more such interesting technology and innovative detailing, keep reading The Inner Detail).
