MANU GUPTA

Wish to share that I feel great about how a project pursued during my undergraduate years for OLPC laptop with my advisers, Walter Bender and Dan Bricklin (inventor of first commercial spreadsheet) along with a collaborator, Preeti KS and Luke Closs have turned up. The name of the project is SocialCalc (https://vimeo.com/11886029 ; SocialCalc on Sugar page at Sugar Activities Catalogue - http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4084 ; http://www.bricklin.com/javascriptrollson.htm ; http://www.peapodcast.com/sgi/socialtext/sctraining1/). We have a company around the wikipedia of spreadsheets which I am running with my partner, Ramu Ramamurthy and fellow team members. We have over 500,000 customers and it feels great serving them and sustaining the project. We also contribute in its open source version "EtherCalc" with fellow collaborator, Audrey Tang, who is the Digital Minister at Taipei and is a well known innovator and developer. We faced multiple roadblocks towards sustaining the project as we didn't have any sustainable market distribution channel for the first 3 years. We overcame them by participating in open source research conferences, submitting and publishing concept papers and product papers to international conferences and journals and supporting open government movement ( http://purplemotes.net/2009/09/13/universal-social-access-to-data-and-calculation/). I wish to share some of the publications that we did in the initial years that helped us get feedback, develop credibility and trust in the open source eco-system -

"SocialCalc: A Spreadsheet Activity for Computer Supported Collaborative Learning", Manu Sheel Gupta, K.S. Preeti, Vijit Singh, Proceedings of the 2010 Conference on Frontiers in Education: Computer Science and Computer Engineering, FECS 2010, Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S.A., CSREA Press 2010, ISBN 1-60132-143-0, pp. 304-309 URL - http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/conf/fecs/fecs2010.html

"Implementation of Private Cloud Computing using Integration of JavaScript and Python", K.S. Preeti, Vijit Singh, Manu Sheel Gupta, The Python Papers Monograph, The PyCon Asia Pacific 2010, Singapore Management University Download URL - http://ojs.pythonpapers.org/index.php/tppm/article/view/149/161

"Spreadsheet on Cloud - Framework for Learning and Health Management System", K.S. Preeti, Vijit Singh, Sushant Bhatia, Ekansh Preet Singh, Manu Sheel Gupta, Proceedings of the EuSpRIG Conference "Spreadsheet Governance - Policy and Practice" ISBN : 978-0-9566256-9-4

Collaborating Towards Learning, Using Social Spreadsheets for Health Education and Community Awareness, Sixth International Conference of MIT’s Learning International Networks Consortium (LINC), MIT, Cambridge, USA.

SocialCalc project has also been covered in important sections of the following conference papers -

"A March Towards Constructionism based on Storytelling, Gaming and Collaboration", Manu Sheel Gupta, Vijit Singh, Manjot Pahwa, The Fifth International Conference of Learning International Networks Consortium (LINC) 2010, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A.

"Collaborating Towards Learning: Using Web 2.0 for Educational Idea Development", Krittika Adhikary, Manu Sheel Gupta, Ekansh Preet Singh, Swarandeep Singh, The Fifth International Conference of Learning International Networks Consortium (LINC) 2010, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A.

We got our first breakthrough from HP, California office when we did a custom spreadsheet for them adapting from SocialCalc for their PC and post PC devices. This was followed by developing custom spreadsheet solutions for key players in Post PC eco-system, namely Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung, Blackberry, Barnes and Noble and Opera Mobile. Our strategy on keeping the project simple, adaptable and extensible and growing with the users' feedback have given us an opportunity to do what we like to do on a daily basis - solve customer problems, build things, learn and explore in the open source eco-system and participate in a variety of initiatives like NSIT IIF, University of Delhi incubation center at NSIT (funded by Delhi government) and blockchain hackathons. We were introduced to ethereum and its applications more than an year back. We wish to productionize our efforts in utilizing the strengths of Ethereum blockchain in the SocialCalc project. We have participated in a variety of blockchain hackathons namely Consensys hackathon at IIT Delhi (https://www.eventbrite.com/e/consensys-india-blockchain-hackathon-2018-tickets-47572158607#tickets) and IBC Hackathon (http://www.ibchack.com/) organized by the government and Niti Aayog together with private companies. We believe that this would be a game changer in our work with the community (Plan Ceibal OLPC Deployment Project, Uruguay - http://

; http://vimeo.com/5291250) as well as with the enterprise and government.