Manu Sharma

I am an Engineer by background, Technology Entrepreneur by choice, and Community Activist at heart. I have spent the last 15 years of my life building unique technology solutions, encouraging young entrepreneurs, supporting community betterment initiatives, facilitating innovation relationships and developing niche talent advancement programs. I have a strong strategic interest in creating opportunities to empower individuals, organizations and communities to connect, communicate, collaborate and co-create.

As a technology entrepreneur, I have spent a good part of the last decade designing and building enterprise applications for some of the most complex business domains including real estate, ecommerce, retail, insurance, hospitality, education and most recent in the realm of social computing. My expertise extends to thick client, thin client and realtime applications using technologies such as PHP/My SQL, Ruby/Rails, Java/J2EE, ASP.Net, C/C++. I have also worked extensively with most open source CMS platforms including WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, ExpressEngine, DotNetNuke and Plone, as well as with prominent open source mobile toolkits and libraries.

I am currently engaged as a Managing Partner with OAK Computing, an Ottawa based full service software development firm that I co-founded. Previously, I worked with OCRI as the Manager of Entrepreneurship Development & Innovation Support, a role in which I developed, managed, facilitated and supported youth entrepreneurship and innovation support programs in Ottawa. Over the last 10 years, I have worked closely with a host of entrepreneurship and innovation programs, including Foundry Program, University of Ottawa Entrepreneurship & Innovation Endowment fund, Wes Nicol Business Plan Competition, Tech Venture Challenge (TVC), Ottawa Innovation Challenge, Ottawa Community Challenge, The Ottawa Experience, Canadian Youth Business Foundation (CYBF), Hire Immigrants Ottawa (HIO) and Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE).