PiQx’s portable scanner could change the way books are digitized

For three years, PiQx founder Loi Yew Kien led his band of merry men in pursuit of the elusive goal of creating a portable scanner that could improve the way books are scanned, and at a fraction of the cost.

Like the Biblical Jewish exodus from Egypt, Loi and team were forced into the wilderness: they were part of a pool of 150 employees from Epson’s scanner business unit that was sacked in 2010. Loi himself was an employee of 11 years who headed R&D at Epson’s Scanner Design Centre.

Starting PiQx wasn’t exactly the first thing on his mind, as the thought of standing up against the likes of Canon and Xerox was daunting. Loi had several job offers, but he wanted the prospective employer to also take up his four guys, who were his colleagues at Epson. While some companies balked at his request, he couldn’t bear to leave them in a lurch. He says:

These guys were depending on me, and I’ve agreed with them to start a company. I couldn’t leave them out.

Eventually, a private investor, who Loi cannot disclose, took interest and decided to fund their endeavor. That was the genesis of Xcanex (pronounced Scannex), the startup’s first product.

The R&D unfortunately, took two-and-a-half years, one year more than they had planned. In total, $1.6 million was pumped into this project even before a sale was made.

But a small glimmer of hope emerged in June this year. Through online sales on Amazon, their own website, and promotions at consumer technology fairs, they’ve managed to ship 200 units in three months and generated some positive reviews, a modest start for sure. But it signified that they’ve gotten over a hump, and are now ready to aggressively market their product.

A truly unique scanner

There isn’t anything quite like Xcanex out there. Available at $299, the device is much cheaper than existing book scanners like the Zeta, which takes up a lot of table space and costs in the thousands.

To begin, users can place a book onto a foldable board provided with the scanner. The board is designed to be placed over your keyboard for the purpose of saving table space. The device scans the page by snapping a picture of it, and its use of flash ensures the ability to scan in all lighting conditions.

Here’s when the magic happens: Unlike normal consumer scanners and wand devices, Xcanex automatically detects if you’re digitizing the pages of the same book. Once the process is complete, the scanned pages can be saved into a single OCR PDF document, which means your computer can recognize and index the text.

The scanner comes with other nifty features like auto enhancement, auto page flattening, and auto orientation — all designed to make book scanning as easy as possible. Ideally, you won’t need to care about aligning the book properly or flattening the pages — it’s all done for you. The software even digitally removes fingers from scans.

Xcanex is versatile too. Besides scanning books with pages up to A5 in size, the device can digitize singular A4 documents, photos, and namecards. It can detect and remove gloss, and even act as a visualizer, which is useful for lecturers who want to write out formulas on a flat surface and show it to students, for instance.

Still rough around the edges

Niche appeal