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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Why not surprise your staff or key clients this year with a credit-card sized USB Stick?

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Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat, and after a long year searching for a credit card USB Stick that doesn’t have a permanently sticking out connector (risk of snapping) or a rotating connector (breaks up your picture), USB Company are proud to announce our new product, the USB Stealth Card.

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Featuring full colour printing, a retracting USB connector on the underside (so no risk of snapping or distortion to your branding) and a smooth plastic finish, the Stealth Card slots perfectly into your wallet.

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This is the perfect time of year to send a Stealth Card. With Christmas around the corner, people are receiving the other type of card every day. Pretty soon their shelves will be full of them. Sending a Stealth card can really catch people’s eyes and get them talking about them. Not only that, but with its slim line design, it will even fit nicely inside an envelope with a more traditional card.

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Already planned your Christmas promotional spending? That’s okay, as credit card based USB Sticks are still relatively new to the market. Chances are if you send out a Stealth Card in the New Year, it’ll still be the first USB Stick in their wallet, putting your brand alongside the things they hold dear, such as their money and pictures of their family!

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What will your card say about you?

With Christmas just around the corner, we’re all looking for those perfect gifts. Here at USB Company, we feel we may just have the answer.

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A stunning blend of tradition and gadgetry, the USB Incenti-Pen combines the usefulness of a ballpoint pen, something everyone keeps a few of on their desk, with a high speed USB 2.0 memory stick. Send one or the other and you may win a bit of valuable desk space, and put a small smile on the recipient’s face, but combine the two and you’ve just given them a conversation piece; something that they will show their friends, family and colleagues.

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One idea we like is to go for the Red Incenti-Pen, with either a Snowman or Christmas Tree printed on it, along with “Merry Christmas from”, followed either by your company name, or better yet, your logo. Alternatively, perhaps brand your company logo on one side of the pen, while having a festive theme on the other?

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With 1GB or more of memory, the Incenti-Pen also makes an excellent gift for your own staff. You might even be generous enough to skip the company logo all together, and just send them a nice festive Christmas pen / USB stick. Then again, if they are getting incenti-pens for Christmas, they should be proud enough to work for you to want the logo!

Have a look at your desk. There are three things I can guarantee you have there.

1) A mouse mat.

2) A mouse.

3) A pen.

While we don’t do mouse mats here at USB Company, we do both USB mice and USB Pens.

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Think about it. Who doesn’t have a mouse or a pen on their desk? And yet so many people will have a few cheap BIC pens, or perhaps even a cheap pen with a logo on it. If they have a premium looking “business” pen though, it’s almost certainly made by one of the big makes. What a waste of premium advertising space! Not to mention the fact that if they have a USB Stick in their pen, they are sure to use it. That means your catalogue will always be quite literally at their fingertips!

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And as for the mouse, how many of you have anything but “Dell”, “Logitec” or “Microsoft” plastered across your mouse. How many of your customers have the same problem? A lot of them will spend upwards of 90% of their day at their desk, with the mouse sitting in their peripheral vision. That’s a great place for your logo to be sitting, constantly reminding them to buy your products.

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So, why not put your logo onto some of the best advertising real estate in existence, your customer’s desks?

The new university year is starting soon and the Freshers are slowly filtering in to your city. However, as soon as they are settled in, the task to fill next year’s places will begin, to attract the brightest, hardest working students. It’s not too long before we’ll be seeing open days, information packs and talks at 6th Forms across the country.

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Why not add an extra little gift into your presentations though? Don’t send them a 50 page catalogue that they will browse through on the bus before leaving on the seat, send them a USB stick instead, pre-loaded with all of your information. Your logo will always be in front of them, your catalogue always in their pocket.

]]> http://www.usbcompany.co.uk/blog/make-sure-you-are-option-1-on-their-ucas-forms/feed/ http://www.usbcompany.co.uk/blog/taking-encryption-to-the-next-level/ http://www.usbcompany.co.uk/blog/taking-encryption-to-the-next-level/#comments Fri, 19 Sep 2008 16:10:44 +0000 john http://www.usbcompany.co.uk/blog/?p=98  

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.

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We’ve recently noticed that our last few orders from Viking have included a 2% “Extra Protection Plus” charge. Now this is a charge that isn’t removable during online purchasing, is hidden in the small print of the catalogue and is applied automatically to all purchases. So, what does it do exactly? It extends our warranty to cover accidental damage. So, if we drop our box of envelopes and they smash into pieces, or we accidently shatter our paperclips, we’re covered. If I’d known about this earlier, I would have saved all those bits of tape that stuck together while trying to tape boxes up. We could have got a couple of pennies back for them!

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While we were annoyed to be caught up in the Vista Print scam, at least they are bona-fide conmen. We have to admit we thought Viking would be better than that though. Charging accidental damage insurance by default on all invoices, and making it un-removable other than by phoning up and wasting half an hour would be bad enough if we were buying high price electronics. But for a company selling us general office consumables such as paper, paperclips and tape it is nothing short of fraudulent in our eyes.

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Its to be said that we are very happy with the service and products of Viking- Direct so far. What puzzles us is why big sucessful companies risk their reputation and potentially customers by doing such scams without the customers consent. We guess its somoething called GREED. (Not to talk about the 95% which probably dont notice it and keep paying it. Anyway now you have been warned!

If I could sell you a brand new £50 note, for the bargain price of £20, you’d bite my hand off, wouldn’t you?
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Well, I can. Sort of…
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You see, USB Sticks aren’t just a way to keep your customers happy, to build or sustain your brand image or get a new product out there. They can also drive sales. And of course, more sales means more money.
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Why not try offering a free USB Stick with every order over £50 this month? Or a free USB Stick if you reccomend a friend and they in turn spend over £50? Perhaps you could offer a range of incentives, matching memory size to the amount spent? Stand out from the crowd by using promotional gifts in a different way, to actually increase the bottom line now, rather than just building for the future.

Of course, the question has to be “Will offering a free USB Stick make my customer spend more than they usually would? Or spend money when they’d usually wouldn’t?”
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To answer the first part, I have four words for you. Amazon Super Saver Delivery. How often have you wanted a £5 book, but ended up spending £15 just to qualify for the chance to have it delivered free? The answer for me has to be “More often than I’d admit”. Now if they can make someone treble their spending to qualify for a £2 saving, what could a USB Stick make someone spend? Far more than it would cost you to buy it in, I’d wager.
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As for the second part, how often have you been browsing through a catalogue, walking down the high street or surfing the internet, not intent on buying anything, when the offer of a free muffin with every coffee, a free cookie with every sub of the day or free songs with the latest Ipod has drawn you in?
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Meanwhile, even the customers that would have bought enough to qualify for the free USB Stick aren’t a loss. After all, it’s still going to build their loyalty to you, make them feel appretiated, and acts as a brilliant way to deliver a new catalogue or showcase a new product launch to them by additionally preloading something onto the sticks.
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USB Sticks really are win-win.

So, you have your nice new shiny USB Stick. The print looks good, it’s well built, and you’re ready to go. Then the phone rings. That new USB stick you’ve got, could you put a few files on it and bring it round later?
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This is often where true quality shines through.
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We recently obtained branded USB sticks from some of our better rivals and performed speed tests on them. We also threw in a major highstreet USB Brand, just to see how we compared to the premium consumer sticks.
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The worst of our rivals came in at 1 Megabyte writing, with just under 8 Megabytes reading speed. This was followed closely by our other rival, who clocked in at 1.18Megabytes writing. Their reading speed, however, came back at a shocking 4.81Megabytes per second. Now this may or may not mean much to you, so lets put it into context. Both of them would require approximately fifteen minutes to fill up a 1GB memory stick. The slower reading stick would then take almost four minutes just to read that data back off of the stick, with the better of the two coming in at just under two minutes.
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Next up was the highstreet brand. This performed far better, 3.8Megabytes writing speed and 9.9Megabytes reading speed. Just over four minutes here to write a full gigabyte to the stick, and again just under 2 minutes to read the data back.
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Now for our results. We picked a random stick out of our local stock, and found writing speeds of 4.1Megabytes per second, and a reading speed of 15.8Megabytes per second. Our one gigabyte stick would be writing at the same speed that some of our rivals are reading. Four minutes would leave you with a full memory stick. It would then take approximately one minute to read it back off of the stick.
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So, why is this the case?
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In other blog posts I’ve talked about the difference between good and bad suppliers. There are companies out there using dodgy controller chips, hacked memory and recycled chips. While we can’t verify for certain that the rivals we tested don’t take part in these practices, this probably wasn’t the case in this situation. It was a simple case of “acceptable” quality against high quality.
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Flash memory is available, from the major suppliers (such as Sony) in both “A” and “B” grade. The B grade memory is perfectly good memory that failed to meet certain standards with regards to speed, reliability and performance. However, it was deemed “acceptable” for certain uses, therefore didn’t end up in the bin with really bad chips. This B grade memory is then put into promotional USB drives in order to cut costs. After all, they are being given away free, right? I’m sure your customers won’t blame you if they end up slow, unresponsive and ultimately unreliable in comparison? Will they? I mean, they were free, after all?
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At USB Company, we’d rather not take that risk. We believe in only using the highest quality memory, paired with the highest quality controller chips, put together in the highest quality factories, complete with the highest quality finish. The result of that is plain to see.= Faster chips, far lower failure rates, and lots of very satisfied customers.
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So ask yourself. Would you be happy if it took you almost 20 minutes to write some data onto your USB Stick then copy it onto another computer?
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If your friend was doing the same thing in five minutes, I bet you wouldn’t be.