I think this is a ridiculously brilliant idea. It's probably hard for Americans and folks in the West to imagine why this is a big deal. There are millions of vendors who basically dominate India's retail market, which is probably one of the largest unorganized corners of the global economy with the world's largest population. There have been tons of efforts and a significant amount of VC funding to digitize unorganized retail (the Kirana segment) in India, and many of these companies have struggled. I think part of the challenge is that they were trying to get shopkeepers to change behavior and force them away from their existing sales and checkout process. The elegance of the Kirana sale/checkout is efficiency - no barcodes to scan, no POS to deal with, and it's probably 3-4x faster than any modern checkout process. However, there is one tool they always use - a calculator.<p>This product basically enables me to do what I already do as a shopkeeper and maintain existing efficiencies while I also have the opportunity to digitize my transactions. I think it could be a game-changer.<p>Full disclosure: I grew up in a tiny town in India, and this was pretty much 100% of my retail experience!
Syncs with their phone app, to keep a track of bills and expenses. Based on the Espressif ESP32. Quite handy for small shop owners who can't have a full-blown computer+screen cash register.<p>Disclaimer: I am working as a freelancer for their next version of hardware that will be based on Linux.
Nice project.<p>Few suggestions:
1. Change/Update your logo. I find it hard to read it the font is not best for alphabets.
2. In the product itself, the brand name is reversed for the shopkeeper. I initially thought maybe it's some smart name that could be read in reverse as well (like 1300135 lol). It is overengineered, just keep it simple it.
3. Add a real use-case demo in your website. It is currently filled with garbage/gibberish.
It will be help if any of the videos showed this thing actually working physically. So many flashy videos but none of them actually shows how it looks and works in practice.
This is absolutely brilliant. It doesn't change the way shopkeepers and small business owners currently work, which is absolutely critical to its success. Uses a familiar form factor, another critical aspect to its success. Can work offline. Store the history of millions of transactions and then sync the next time it connects. Is mechanically robust. Has a long warranty by industry standards.<p>Congratulations to whoever came up with this.
This is great.<p>If you mistakenly cash in/out, is there an undo?<p>I get the logic of it, but I wouldn't put those two buttons right next to each other.
would you people be interested in opening up the api to connect to third party softwares? i have [gnukhata](<a href="https://gnukhata.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://gnukhata.org/</a>) which is AGPL licensed accounting software and this would be great synergy between local hardware and software.
Seems to me most of today's "calculators" are either (a) dinosaurs of the past or (b) what used to be called a supercomputer. Lately, I've gotten interested in the less unexplored middle ground!
This product page is just terrible.<p>I went through it, played a couple noisy videos, I could not even read the labels of the 3 first rows of buttons, I have no idea how it exactly works...<p>Surely just adding and subtracting like the video shows doesn't record cash in hands etc?
i have a fundamental problem with "accounting" for small businesses.<p>1. if they are registered with GST, they should probably start maintaining inventory and for that,this device is not useful.<p>2. if they are NOT registered with GST, they can't even bother with this because nowadays UPI is becoming the norm and all sale gets recorded there anyway.<p>this would only serve the niche of "not-registered for GST and using cash" but knowing how big india is, with the right marketing, this should blow up in a good way