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!

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.

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.

Earlier today we received the long awaited order for the popular online dating site, Zoosk.com. This order had to be revised quite a few times along the way to meet the stringent requirements many corporations have for the use of their logos, and since these drives had been in pre-production for quite some time everyone at the office was excited to see how they turned out. I think I can safely say that nobody was disappointed.

The drives were a bit unusual in that they were printed in 5 colors. Typically we print up to 4 colors, or if more colors are required we use full-color print process instead. Zoosk also decided to have the drive body made in a custom color, to match the light blue color in their logo. Clearly their design team knows what they are doing, because these USB drives came out looking great.

Duffy & Shanley, a marketing company, ordered some flash drives and some of our metal display cases to match. The SWM was used and they handed us their PMS color to create a custom body color. The interesting thing about the order was that the USB Drives had no contact or company info on them, the boxes where used to display all that information. That left them a ton of space to print their logo fairly large which looks really good. Below are they pictures, hope to see more creativity in future orders

Not really growing, but we sure made it look that way, well we tried. Usually we try to find more colorful and intricate logos and drives to take pictures of. This order, however, stood out. The simplistic nature of the logo and complexity of the font really made it look good. It shows just how nice the DE White style can be with just a plain print in a nice font with a cool color.

Auntie Anne’s, the pretzel deities if you’ve never heard of them ordered from us and you know what that means, pretzel party for the office! Along with the imprinted DE white drives they ordered we got 10-20 pretzels, just ’cause. I must say both where really awesome. We took some pictures of the drives and I managed to concoct a new signature item: carton-o-usb .

It was very surprising to me that the pretzel made it through the whole photo shoot.

’till next time.

Some of the best looking prints are on white backgrounds so its a big surprise we get few orders for custom colored swivels on the SWM USB Drive. El Dorado Restoration, however, wanted to get a white swivel for their order and as expected they came out very well.

If you want to see more pictures visit the SWM style page on our site or search for SWM