USB flash drives, marketing, hobbies | Ramblings from the brain of Nicholas Moller

One of the great things about working at usbmemorydirect.com is all the cool companies and brands we get to collaborate with. Recently we had the pleasure of printing custom USB drives for Blizzard Entertainment, a company I have a lot of personal experience with. Blizzard is a video game developer and publisher, which will soon be celebrating 20 years since its inception. My personal experience with Blizzard stems back to 1994, when I was just a kid with my very first computer. I didn’t have any computer games, but I did have a demo for Blizzard’s first game, “Warcraft”, which I played incessantly. Since then I have been a loyal customer and have played many of their computer games, even to this day. Needless to say, when I learned we would be making an order of flash drives for them, I was pretty excited about it.

The drives Blizzard choose to use, are the SWM style USB drive, which is one of our top-selling flash drives. As you can see, it has a swivel cap where the logo is printed. This is convenient as the caps from flash drives often are misplaced. I think this design showcases how you do not need any gimmicks or an outrageous design to make attractive USB drives for marketing. In this case the logo speaks for itself, as anyone familiar with the brand can instantly recognize the brand. These drives really came out great and I hope Blizzard is as pleased with them as we are. What they will do with them is anyone’s guess, but I think it would be awesome if they made their next release available on flash drive! I would certainly buy one.

This week, I’ve got some concept photos to show off. We offer dozens of styles to choose from when you are designing your own custom drive, and one of the most popular are the card styles. Card style USB drives are about the size of a standard credit card, a bit thicker, and they’ve got a built in USB drive! These make wonderful business cards to hand out to business associates and they make a great impression when you are making new contacts. The USB dongle can be programed to launch your website when it is plugged in, or you can store your catalog and promotions on it.

Although these are concept designs, we can easily design and produce these USB business cards for you or your company, just request a quote from our contact page, and we will get back to you with prices and availability within minutes!

While we post pictures of many of the unique drives that are ordered from us, when the order falls into one of two categories, I make it a point to snap some photos. Those two categories are: well known, global organizations (such as our drives for BMW, McDonald’s, and Heineken) and computer & internet related organizations (Zoosk, CBTNuggets.com, ClareHome). Today we have an order that fits both my favorite categories: swivel style drives for Intel Corporation, the multinational computer chip manufacturer. Feast your eyes on this:

Intel choose to go with our swm style, a capless USB drive with their logo printed right onto the metal swivel part of the drive. They also ordered custom printed cases with the drive, wallet sized metal boxes that feature Intel’s logo as well as a clear window through which you can see the USB drive. I can’t help but wonder what use these drives will be put to: will they be distributed to consumers as a promotional product, or will they be used in-house in one of Intel’s factories or corporate offices? Ultimately I cannot speculate what Intel’s intentions are for these drives, but I do know this, the Intel logo looks great on this white and silver drive and I wish we had some extras so I could add one to my collection. Oh well, there’s always the next order…

Our latest custom shaped flash drive was ordered by a company called ClareControls for their new line of cloud based smart-home technology. I have been interested in smart houses and the products designed for them for a few years now, as it is apparent to me that technology like this will become common place in the coming years. ClareHome utilizes cloud based computing to allow you to control your home from anywhere using a variety of devices. Powered by Mac mini computers, they have developed their own operating system, ClareOS, and a library of apps that allow you to control a variety of devices,  from your fireplace to your house alarm or your garage door.

ClareControls choose to have their company logo made into a custom flash drive, and I’d say the results are right on point. The logo features a house inside a cloud and is the perfect representation of what the company is about. The back of the drive has the name of the company in raised lettering which also looks very good. All in all we were very pleased with how the order turned out, and we hope our clients are as happy with them as we are.

Besides making the specific flash drives our customers order, we also spend a lot of time online, scouring the internet for cool and interesting ideas to incorporate into flash drive design. Sometimes we find somebody who has beaten us to the punch, so to speak, and made a really unique flash drive on their own. This is exactly the case with the drive I’m featuring today, the FlashHarp. Found on etsy.com this drive is a functional harmonica, as well as a working flash drive, though its a bit smaller than the usual harmonica and a bit larger than the average flash drive.

Although a cool concept, the price tag is hefty for a 4GB flash drive, not to mention the fact that you cannot use both functions of the device at once, so if you were hoping to learn to play the harp while transferring files onto your flash drive, you will have to look elsewhere. Regardless of it’s shortcomings, this drive really caught our attention for being an original and fun idea. If you’ve got a cool flash drive or have seen a really unique one online, let us know. We are always interested to see what cool ideas are being thought up!

This week we had an order for MGSCOMM, a advertising agency, come through the office. The drives immediately caught my eye because of the vibrant colors the customer chose for their order. Though the flash drives they choose (the WBM style) were all black, they brightened the look of the drives by using their “think” logo in a variety of colors.

The logo on this style of drive is covered with an epoxy seal, making the design more durable as well as giving it an attractive shine. As you can tell, we had some fun taking photos of these drives!

We got another custom shaped drive order through the office today. These drives were custom made for CBTNuggets.com and is the shape of their site logo. In case you did not know, cbtnuggets.com is one the top websites for learning IT and obtaining a certification at home or at the office. They offer video courses that cover Microsoft, Cicso, Oracle, Linux, CompTIA and more. I’ve been browsing their site, and they’ve really got some interesting courses, such as the “Certified Ethical Hacker” lessons.

The drive itself looks great, as you can see from the photos. Their logo lends itself well to be made into a flash drive, because like most standard USB drives, it is shaped like a rectangular prism. The outside of the drive is made of a durable rubberized material that can survive drops and is unscathed by light scratches. All in all, I think these came out great and we hope CBT likes them as much as we do.

Today I checked the mail and I was quite surprised to see what was waiting for me. BMW sent me their welcome package for our new car. Apparently they are pretty hip to the USB scene because inside the little box/booklet was a card style USB drive with a custom epoxy coated raised BMW logo.

I plugged it into my computer, and a cool video started up automatically. People driving fast through scenic countryside and winding roads, all with huge smiles on their faces. These guys know their customers, I do like driving fast. Once the video ended, a flash screen appeared and I was presented with several options. There was a section with a digital owner’s manual, links to videos about the car’s features, special promotions BMW is running and information about how and why to sign up for an online account. It was a very well made presentation, and including it all on a custom flash drive was the icing on the cake. Had they emailed me with the same videos and information, I probably would never have read it, but receiving this physical USB drive made me excited to see what they had sent me. I checked out every last thing on the drive.

BMW really used these drives to their full potential. An attractive custom design on the card style drive and a preloaded auto-play presentation with links to their website, all on one of our most popular card style drives.

We recently received an order for color matched flash drives for Too Faced Cosmetics, a trendy cosmetics brand. Known for its fashion-forward shades and tints, Too Faced offers a collection of products that are featured in everything from television to fashion magazines, and has amassed a following of loyal customers.

They were particular about the drive color, and offered us Pantone specifications that produced a perfect shade of pale pink, reminiscent of youthful color.

The Too Faced motto really sums it up for this order of prestigious flash drives, “Why be pretty when you can be gorgeous?”.

• Current ETA: ??
• Current Project Status: We came to an agreement, but we discovered an older patent (US 2005/0278186 A1). We have reached out to this person and an IP attorney.

Hi again Reddit! First we’d like to thank you once more for the outpouring of support and interest in this project. Our original post showed there is a lot of people who think this a cool idea, and we have been working on the particulars ever since. Due to the continued inquiries we have received on our website, as well as Reddit posts like these, we thought we aught to give everyone an update.

Currently we are investigating final design and production costs, looking into potentially existing patents and determining what, if any, royalties are due. We are moving as quickly as possible to make these drives a reality. You can check back on this site for the current status of production, or just hang tight and keep an eye on your inbox, we will definitely be sending out an email as soon as these final decisions are made.

UPDATE 8/22/11

Tarator the original creator has already sold the rights to this particular device. We have initiated contact with the new rights hold, gifts.ru, in an attempt to obtain the right to sell it in the US markets, this would include orders out of country but only if they are reached via US based marketing IE all of reddit. Tarator has also made an offer for us to purchase rights of his latest creation http://steampunker.ru/blog/4677.html, not as interesting as the cryptex drive i must admit. We won’t be giving up so easily, there are many other routes that can be taken.

UPDATE 8/30/11

We are attempting t forge an agreement which will allow us to use their manufacturing facilities. This will reduce our lead time in producing the device. The sample is being created as we speak and should be done within a week. At that point we will be able to negotiate pricing for the rights.

UPDATE 9/2/11

We will get some initial cost info from the rights holder. As it stands we are prepared to make two offers depending on whether we can use their manufacturing plant (of course we will make sure quality is good). The amount we offer for royalties is contingent on us not having to fabricate milling parts to produce the drives and of course how much their factory will charge us.

The latest email which came to use today informed me that we will have price points from their factory first thing Monday morning. At which point it will take a couple hours to prepare our offer to them. If all goes smoothly we’ll have word by lunch time.

UPDATE 9/14/11

We are reaching the end of negotiations. Hopefully we will arrive at some sort of accord shortly. Once the agree has been finalized we will need to make sure we are covered and sign contracts, this could take a couple days. After that it is smooth sailing and we should see the first samples within a couple weeks. Full production a week after. We will be emailing everyone with any major updates.

UPDATE 10/18/11

We have reached an agreement with the company that owns the rights to this drive in Russia. Samples are close to being completed in the factory which gifts.ru is using for creating these drives. Fahad posted below about a patent that was undoubtedly used as the idea for the basis of this drive. Whether or not it would be considered a derivative work is something that might be up to a court. In light of this we have contacted a couple IP attorneys for legal support and while the goings are slow they are still goings.

One thing is for sure, I am going to try my best to green light this all the way through regardless of the legal implications. Hopefully we sell enough to cover a $250k legal proceeding lol, fingers certainly crossed on that one.