Last week, I was interviewed by manaleak.com to discuss the ION Scanner.  We spent about 15 minutes on the phone talking about what ION is, how we'll be distributing it, and how we think it'll change Magic: The Gathering forever.

With as much as Trader Tools offered, there was still a problem. “This tool will do all the heavy lifting once it knows what cards I own,” says Reid. “I don’t have time to type in every single card.”

This is a problem faced by most Magic: The Gathering retailers who want to inventory their stock of singles. Reid set out to remedy this problem with a software that could do that job for him. “I had a webcam taped to a stick,” says Reid, “and I stitched together a couple of pieces of open-source software, and eventually I was able to get it to recognize a Magic card in about 10 or 20 seconds, which is obviously way too slow.” As a result, Reid shelved the project.

Over the next few years, the technology of card scanning began to improve. Apps were developed for smartphones that allowed users to scan their cards into a database using the built-in cameras, for example.

“The problem was that you have to hold your phone in one hand, and manipulate cards in the other hand,” Reid says, “and I didn’t really care for that. As a store owner, you might have millions of cards that are sitting in cards and uncatalogued.”

Read the Whole Interview Here

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Listen to it Here