Usb Company

There was a time when car owners and automobile manufacturers weren’t very conscious about their carbon footprint, or the negative effect that cars could have on the environment. However, things have changed for the better. Rising fuel costs and growing public demand has forced manufacturers to begin designing environment friendly cars. Today, the majority of new cars on the market pollute far less than their predecessors.
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Cars today are designed with inbuilt computers that adjust fuel flow and air-intake. These computers help make the car more environment friendly. However, there is still one factor that that remains, the driver himself. How a person drives their car can make a huge difference in fuel economy.

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What if there was an application in your car that could talk to you and help you drive better, bringing CO2 emissions down dramatically? Well, Fiat Automobiles SpA has devised just such an application. Fiat, known as one of the most environment friendly car manufacturers in Europe, realized that software technology can help reduce auto emissions of CO2, which is responsible for global warming. Combining with Microsoft, the pair have come together to create just that… EcoDrive.

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EcoDrive is the first of its kind in the world. It communicates with car drivers and helps them change their driving habits for the better. It is an enjoyable and easy to use application that offers advice on your driving habits once your journey is over.
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If you have Blue&Me, a Bluetooth tooth based system developed by Microsoft, which offers drivers an interactive and intelligent hands free control system over mobile phones and music players in their cars, you should be able to use EcoDrive.
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Blue&Me  EcoDrive reviews your driving style for you. All you need to do is detach the plugged in USB Stick from your dashboard and plug it into your computer or laptop. With the help of EcoDrive application, the information of your latest driving excursion will appear on your computer screen. Fiat’s application is an extremely user-friendly format that interacts with you the driver, and lets you know how many pounds of emissions were produced on the trip you just took. A list of suggestions will appear on how these emissions can be reduced by driving in a more environment friendly manner.
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This is a real first,” says Cilimingras, Fiat Advertising Manager. “For the first time, we can extract data from an ordinary car right out of the factory and send it to a notebook computer or personal computer.” The Fiat Grande Punto will be fitted with Ecodrive, however earlier Fiat cars with Blue&Me will also be able to upgrade Eco drive for free!

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USB Company are proud to announce that we are the first major promotional USB supplier to offer custom branded USB sticks with hardware based encryption!

We’ve offered software based encryption for a few weeks now, and it has proved fairly popular.  When data’s merely confidential and best kept private, rather than potentially damaging, software based protection is perfect. It takes quite a lot to force your way through the layers of security, and with little to gain it’s unlikely anyone will bother to do so.

However, we do understand that some of you carry data on USB Sticks that is absolutely critical. Sometimes the remotest possibility of data being retrieved from a lost or stolen device is so worrying that even the best software based methods aren’t good enough. Therefore, we’re proud to announce that we’ve recently entered a partnership with a major provider of hardware-based encryption for flash drives.  As a result of this, we can now offer sticks with a dedicated processor installed that looks after the encrypting of data. This protects both against hacking attempts and human error, as any data written to the drive is automatically encrypted before it’s stored to the flash memory.

Hardware based encryption is considerably more expensive than standard software based encryption, due to the fact that each stick has a processor dedicated to encrypting data. However, we are offering very competitive prices, and are currently able to offer branded sticks for their generic, off the shelf recommended retail prices.

With flash memory, the type we use in our USB Sticks, being used in more and more technologies, the original 10,000 re-writes look like they may not always be enough.

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Sure, for the average home user that means decades of flash memory before it starts wearing out, but if you decide to use your flash memory to, say, boost your PC’s RAM (something that faster flash drives, such as ours, can do in Windows Vista) this lifetime can be considerably shorter. In the worst case scenarios, the memory may only last a handful of years.

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While this doesn’t affect most users, and even those it does affect currently have to see it as the price they pay for the usage they get out of the memory, it would be nice if we could somehow increase the number of rewrites each chip can handle.

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Well, it seems that pretty soon, we may be able to.

The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology and the University of Tokyo have teamed up to create new flash memory technologies that allow the memory to last ten thousand times as many rewrites as currently. With around one hundred million rewrites, it’s unlikely that even with faster speeds becoming available we’ll see any chips running out any time in the future. Not only that, but it can also be manufactured 3 times slimmer than existing technology.

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Of course, as soon as this technology is available on the market, we’ll revisit this story and let you know how it affects the Promotional USB market. If nothing else, it can only be a good thing if the higher use devices switch to it, allowing the price of memory for promotional gifts to come down without compromising quality.
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WHa.

What is it?

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The USB Web Button is a round button, 6CM in diameter. When
connected to a USB Port and pressed, it launches a pre-defined website. It can
also be used to launch a specific application, as long as it is installed on
all computers.

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How can you use it?

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The Webpage:

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One possibility is to have it link to your homepage.

Better yet, why not have it link to an exclusive promotion
only available to those with the web buttons?

Better still, why not have that link show new, updated
offers once a month, encouraging people to bookmark the link or keep the button
lying around?

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The Program:

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Does everyone log in from a workstation fed from a single
server? Or are all PCs in your office/school made equally? Have a program that
everyone has to open regularly, such as a data input program or office suite? Instead
of running www.yourpage.com the button
can also run yourprogram.exe.

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The Portal:

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Have a staff/student portal?
A customer relations management tool? Maybe even a central login page?
Why not have the button open it for you?

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Viral:

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So you’ve employed the best minds in the business, came up
with a brilliant idea, shot the video, uploaded it to YouTube, and nothing.
No-one’s noticed it. It hasn’t spread. It isn’t making your product the talk of
town. Why not scatter USB Buttons around the town, linking to the YouTube
video, the front page of the publicity-gaining viral game or whatever it is
your top marketing agents have come up with?

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Please contact us for a free visual and quote on the USB Web Button.

Holding its place as the world’s third-largest OEM buyer of flash, Apple’s weight in the memory industry is indisputable. On that, a market research company expects a near-term boost to the NAND prices and a coinciding increase to Micron’s stock price.

Here at USB Company we will continue to follow the market and manage our stock purchases so we can continue to offer our clients good quality products at a competitive price.

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There are two types of NAND Flash memory architectures: MLC(Multi Level Cell) and SLC(Single Level Cell).

In a nutshell, MLC are used in those devices requiring high performance at an attractive cost such as USB sticks and voice recorders.

SLC are used in the higher performing technology that is used to enable streaming video and Internet capability in handheld electronics such as 3G cell phones, PDAs, digital still / video cameras and MP3 players etc.

All our branded USB drives use MLC memory from Hynix, Samsung or Micron unless otherwise specified. MLC NAND Flash is rated to last approximately 10,000 cycles, which is considered more than sufficient for the average consumer application.

For example, a USB drive application that used the 10,000 write/erase cycles would enable the user to completely write and erase the entire contents once per day for 27 years, well beyond the life of the hardware.

We would also like to warn people about companies offering VERY cheap flash drives. Although many of the products appear same, the inside might be VERY different.

We spend a significant amount of resources in quality control and service. Therefore, our product prices are never the lowest in the industry. We want to give you some facts so that you can better protect your rights and investments.

In general there are four methods to dramatically lower the production cost of the USB flash disks. Unfortunately whichever method or combinations are used, product quality is sacrificed. These methods are usually some of the following:

• Use faulty or recycled flash memory chips, which might cause read and write errors
• Change flash memory chip volume information so that the lower capacity chips appear to be higher capacity (e.g. from 256MB to 512MB)
• Use faulty designed PCBs, which might cause severe electromagnetic interference
• Use faulty designed controller chips, which might cause compatibility problems when using flash disks under different operating systems

Whenever these methods are applied, you can expect problems such as users being unable to save onto the flash disk, or read and copy from the flash disk. It often occurs that operating systems can’t recognise the flash disk, I/O error messages occur, and storage capacity diminishes as the time passes.

By choosing USB Company, you can rest assured none of these will occur.

This week the USB Company sourcing team has been busy trawling the busiest gifts fairs in the world making sure we can offer the best quality usb promotional products at a competitive price.

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The Global sources and the Canton fair is held every April in Hong Kong and China and is where International buyers meet with worldwide suppliers to make the best deals and see the latest product news.

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This year we saw fewer of the smaller factories from Mainland China and we see a trend that there are fewer but bigger factories. There is still hundreds of suppliers and we believe this is a good thing as we can get more consistency. The small suppliers which often only was nothing more than a shed with an assembly line, often flooded the market with cheap sub quality products.

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We had several good meetings with our suppliers and we are happy to see them improve on their quality control procedures and flash memory buying, meaning they can continue to offer us competitive prices and the best quality.

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We will also be adding a few new promotional usb products in the coming months which we believe should further strengthen our product line and be of interest to our clients.

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We also noticed a slight increase in the price for 1GB flash drives as the demand was rising during the Exhibitions but we believe the prices will stabilise shortly.

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Ok that is all for now we are off for another supplier meeting and then we need a well deserved foot massage after all this walking:)

The 3.0 USB Superspeed is expected to be introduced in Q2 2009. USB 3.0 is set to be 10 times faster than the current standard and exceed the speed of most harddrives available today. With the trend of larger capacity usb flash drives this is welcoming news. USB Company will of course follow the developments and will introduce the new standard as soon as it becomes available from our ISO9001 certfied production sites.

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