After many years of effort I am happy to announce that the digital catalogue application Needuum is finally available for use on your iPhone, Android device and on the web, today October 30th 2023.
What is Needuum:
Needuum is a digital catalogue that provides the most comprehensive, accurate, detailed and informative repository of Sports Memorabilia knowledge in existence for the Sports that the platform supports. Needuum also contains industry expert derived pricing, often for multiple condition grades, for thousands of sets and tens of thousands of individual items.
Needuum has consolidated the information originally presented in the "Vintage Hockey Collector" printed guides as well as the "Collecting Canadian Football" printed guides to specialize in memorabilia relating to Vintage Hockey (from origin to 1989-90) and Canadian Football (from origin to present). All updated and newly uncovered information on sets and items that has been accumulated since these paper guides were published has been incorporated into the platform. Pricing has also been updated where deemed necessary by changing market conditions. In addition large sections of never before catalogued types of memorabilia have been added as well.
What's New:
For Canadian Football there is a ton of previously never before catalogued material including Coins, Games, Pennants and Stickers and of course the standard sports card issues right up to the current 2023 releases. Select sets have had pricing revision where warranted.
For Hockey there are thousands of never before catalogued vintage items as well as updates to the existing classic sets where ongoing research has provided new information. All classic Hockey sets from every decade have had thorough pricing updates.
What's Missing:
I would like to be able to say that the Catalogue is fully loaded with individual images for every item, however this is not the case and the addition of images is a work in progress. What has been fully loaded is most of the classic Topps/OPC sets for Canadian Football (with some notable exceptions like the Nalley's coins, the Coke caps and the last few OPC seventies sets) as well as almost all of the Pre-War Hockey sets (again a with few notable exceptions such as Type I Bee-Hives). A decision was made to not postpone the release of the Catalogue another 6 months to load more pictures, as there will always be more items to list and more images to add, and we will do our best to try and get caught up.
How to get Needuum:
Just a Heads-Up that if you downloaded the iPhone APP and are seeing black screens and missing text all over the place, change the Settings > Display & Brightness > Light Mode. A future release will address this problem to display properly in Dark Mode. The joys of keeping up with all of the new Apple features and settings.
There was an issue with Samsung Android devices (and perhaps a few others) preventing successful User Registration. A new release has been put on the Google Play Store and if you were having issues with registering (Error back in the App or "not found" in an empty browser window) then please download the new version which should allow you to register successfully. If you got Registered on your existing Android device you can leave it as is.
Also if using Facebook you MUST allow for your email to be sent as part of the login, it will fail without it.
iPhone Link to Apple App Store
OR Scan the QR Code
Android Link to Google Play Store
OR Scan the QR Code
Web Link to the Web Version
Note that you can, of course run the web version on your mobile browser, but the formatting is a little wonky and the dedicated phone apps provide a much better user experience. These mobile browser formatting issues will be resolved in the near future.
Support:
Needuum contains a lot of information (over 100,000 items at initial launch) and navigating the structure of this amount of data to seamlessly render results on your 3” x 6” phone screen is a complex task. Extensive information on how Needuum works and how to best make sense of what you are seeing on the screen, is available in the Info / FAQ and Help / Support menu option sections on each platform.
A Youtube channel has been set up to walk you through some of the searching and subscribing operations on the various client devices here:
YouTube Link to the YouTube Channel
If you encounter issues there is a support email specified on each client as well.
End of this Blog:
As Needuum contains the ability to present hobby and collectible stories in a very similar fashion to this blog, over the next few months I will be transitioning most of these posts into the App where they will continue to be available to all users, subscribed, registered or not. Any future blog posts will then appear in Needuum.
Toronto Sports Expo:
Bobby Burrell and I will be set up at the Sports Expo in Toronto November 9-12 to promote Needuum to collectors. We will be at booth 1408 near the food fair so if you are at the show stop by if you wish. We also expect to be at the Spring 2024 Expo in Edmonton.