Usb Company

Back in April the BBC reported that at two well respected universities, almost 1% of their students were caught plagarising. Chances are the true numbers were even higher. When I was at University, I caught a flat mate of mine on the same course as me copying large chunks of one of my essays (before slightly rewording them) when I placed them in the shared folder to print. That case, for instance, was dealt with “In house”, and my shamed flat mate found himself stuck in front of his PC all weekend while the rest of us went out and had fun.

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What, you may wonder, does this have to do with USB Sticks?

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Well, one method of checking for plagiarism is the use of various software packages, which can compare thousands of essays, as well as checking Essay banks to make sure none are sourced from them. However, for this software to be of any use at all, you need an electronic version of the complete essay.

So, why not offer your students a branded USB Stick to put their files on? They can then drop it into an envelope and hand it in to the office?

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Better yet, why not have each USB Stick customised with the student’s own student ID on the back, along with the department and/or university logo on the front? That way, even if the stick is lost it’s likely to find its way home, and can then be returned to the student for future essays. When the student graduates, they also have something nice to remember you by.

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In addition, we can pre-load the sticks with your university policies on Plagiarism, and perhaps A couple of PDFs on the correct usage of referencing styles, how to avoid plagiarising and any other essay related tips you may already have flyers for in the library or offer for download from the department home page.

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You may even decide not to ask students to print a copy of their essay at all, both easing the strain on your IT Department on deadline day but also easing the strain on the environment.

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Reduce cheating and your carbon footprint in one move? What more could you ask?

Travel by train regularly?

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Transport files between the office and home?

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Tired of seeing your top secret documents read over by the Nation’s Media?

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Perhaps you need Easylock^tm?

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USB Company are proud to announce a new piece of software from the creators of Carry It Easy +Plus ^tm. Equipped with 256bit AES CBC-mode Military Strength Data Encryption under the hood, but a simple Drag and Drop user interface, Easylock is the perfect solution for your data security needs.

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It’s not just government agencies that need to tighten up data security. In the modern business world, almost any data has value to someone outside your company. Unfortunately, this is usually to the detriment of your own company. On top of this, there’s nothing as damaging for your image as news of a data leak.

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A word of warning, however. Easylock only allows passwords up to 128 characters, so those of you planning to use the first chapter of “1984″ to keep your data secured may be disappointed.

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Easylock usually retails for approximately £13 per licence. However, we can offer Easylock pre-installed on our custom USB Sticks for less than £2 per unit. For more information, please contact a member of our sales team.

We recently took delivery of some books from Amazon, with those came a couple of vouchers. One of them was from Vistaprint which offered “free” stamps. Their targeting was spot on as we just thought about ordering some stamps so we went ahead and ordered the “Free” one and another one from their range. Two weeks later the stamps arrived and it was all looking good.

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But.. a month later an unidentified charge appeared on our bank statement, it was a payment of £9.95 with the reference clubprem.com. We had never had anything with them to do so we called the bank and they told us this was a charge from Vistaprint and of course the charge was irreversible. So we called them and right enough when we ordered the “Free stamps” we had to pay for postage with our credit card and apparently there was some very small print there stating that we agreed to subscribe to clubprem if we ordered these stamps. Certainly we did not see any of these small prints and we have got nice big computer screens..

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It makes us wonder how big companies like Vistaprint are allowed “lure” customers into these traps, it also surprise us that Amazon being on the forefront of e-commerce engages into business activities with dubious companies such as Vistaprint.

We can imagine many people don’t even take notice of such a small charge, luckily we did and manage to cancel the subscription. It definitely teached us a lesson so people beware of these stunts from Vistaprint or others that are offering “good deals”

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Here at USB Company we would never engage in such activity, we believe in honesty and straightforward communication. Imagine luring our customer into a subscription for promotional Usbs now that’s silly….

Being a London based company we thought it would be worth mentioning dunhill of London’s latest addition to their range of luxury products: The dunhill Bulldog USB key, priced at a sobering £195 each. They are probably not suitable for Promotional USB giveaways, but they sure do look good. Here at USB Company we could do around 40×1GB branded USB drives for that price so unless your company has a unlimited marketing budget you are probably better off ordering with us:)

Why we’re not always the cheapest

Clients have come to us in the past with quotes from other companies, asking us if we really are the best choice, why it is we’re not always the cheapest?

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There are factories out there that cut corners in order to bring down the unit cost. The following is a list of how manufacturers can dramatically reduce the cost of USB flash drives:

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• Hack the memory chip so it appears larger than it is. (256mb hacked to appear like 512MB)

• Buy recycled memory and sell as “new”

• Use faulty PCBs or badly designed Controller chips.

• Low Quality Plastic Casing

• Cheap Finish

• Use paint without hardeners so the Logo print easily rubs off

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These are commonly know as “White chips” and tend to be unreliable, more prone to data loss, and often suffer from quite bad degradation over time.

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A well designed USB chip should work perfectly for approximately 10,000 write/erase cycles, which is the equivalent of filling and emptying the stick once a day for 27 years. “White chips” however, may start to suffer right from the first cycle. Other problems that are far more likely with these sorts of practices include operating systems failing to recognise the memory at all, error messages and very slow data transfer speeds.

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There are also factories out there that use perfectly good chips, but just of a lower quality. These goods should last roughly the same amount of time as our chips (10,000 cycles), but tend to have slower read/write speeds and be slightly more prone to errors. There’s nothing wrong with these sticks, in the same way there’s nothing wrong with Tesco Value coffee. However, you wouldn’t serve it to an important customer, would you?

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Now at the USB Company, we realised that you can only be the best at one thing. We decided that rather than join the multitude of companies who try to compete at price, trying their best to cut another corner to get those extra few pennies off of the manufacturing cost of each stick, we’d rather compete on quality.

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We decided that while Mercedes Benz aren’t the cheapest car manufacturer, they are considered among the best, and while Ryan Air can often out price their competitors by quite a margin, we’d all rather not fly with them if we can afford anything else.

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In order to do this, we have teamed up with factories in the Far East, where quality, rather than cost, is the number one priority. We are very careful as to who we buy parts from, be it controller chips or hardeners for the paint, and have set up relationships with our suppliers over several years.

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We also have an extensive quality assurance system, testing items both at the point of manufacture and here in the UK.

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So, some companies may be a little cheaper than us. However, our products are likely to be a bit better than theirs, with a better finish, better materials used, and better technology inside.

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However, we would recommend avoiding them like the plague! Remember, if they are charging you less, they are also buying for less, and buying for less usually means cutting corners, not margins.

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“The bitterness of poor quality is remembered long after the sweetness of low price has faded from memory.” - Aldo Gucci,