The majority of UK schools have closed today due to the national public sector strike. Whether you agree with the action or not, this has left working parents desperately seeking childcare and a way to keep them occupied with meaningful education activities. One of the tools that some progressive schools have used to minimise the impact of this is to upload home learning activities onto school Branded Flash Drives. This will allow pupils to access personalised learning tasks and return them for marking.
There are plenty of other reasons why Brand Memory sticks are so valuable for schools:

• It allows students to transport information between home and school without the need to carry heavy and expensive text books.
• Internet research can be stored on the Branded Memory Stick saving on printing.
• It allows schools to keep their own networks and storage space to a minimum. Some schools only have dumb workstations, with no local memory so Branded Memory Sticks would allow the information to be stored.
• Staff can take information home to mark and check and auto correct.
• Branded Memory sticks are a great incentive / reward for pupils for achieving certain milestones.
• PTAs could consider selling the memory sticks to parents as a fund raising activity.
• It helps students embrace technology, which will be an important part of their future careers.
• Each Branded Memory stick can have pupils name or a unique serial number printed on, so if they do get misplaced they can be returned.
• If the information to be stored on Branded Memory Sticks is sensitive a password or encryption can be added.

As this lists illustrate there are many advantages for schools and colleagues embracing Branded Memory sticks.

USB Flash Drive on Public Sector Strike

There are so many promotional USB flash drive suppliers springing up today that it’s often difficult to work out who’s a legitimate, supplier that sells top quality products that won’t let you down or more importantly won’t let your brand and your customers down with the supply of shoddy and inferior products.

Buying USB flash drives should be straightforward; you choose the model/style you want, you decide on the memory size you need and the quantity you want, you work out how many colours are in the your logo that you want printing on them and then you approach a number of different companies for competitive pricing – easy isn’t it?

Well no, not quite. Unfortunately not all flash drives are created equal and not all suppliers of flash drives are completely open and candid when providing quotes so it’s often difficult to know what you’re being quoted for and it’s therefore really difficult to know that you’re comparing “apples with apples” when you review the pricing you’ve been provided.

Some of the more common “scams” include:

1. Supplying USB flash drives that have been manufactured using Grade B flash memory chips and passing them off as Grade A. This is a really difficult one to deal with because when they’re quoting for your business most suppliers will tell you what you want to hear but the reality is that a lot of promotional flash drives are being supplied with Grade B chips.

   The Flash Chip is the heart of any USB drive – it’s what the data is stored on and it, together with the controller chip determine how quickly the data can be accessed (the read/write speed). A good Grade A chip will have decent usage life (10,000 + read/write cycles), it’ll be reasonably quick and it will have a low failure rate.

   Grade B chips on the other hand are chips that are either “recycled” or failed part of the QA checks during manufacture – they’ll be prone to failure, they’ll typically have slow read/write speeds and they often won’t last more than a few weeks or months in use.

2. Masking the Flash Drive and passing it off as a drive with a higher capacity than it actually has. Again, this is a tricky one to spot because suppliers who deliver these go out of their way to make the printed USB drives look good, they’ll “mask” the drive so when you plug it in and check it’s properties it will look like it has 1GB of storage (assuming you ordered a 1GB drive), it’ll even allow you to copy up to 1GB of data onto it!

   You can only check if it’s been “masked” by loading 1GB of data onto the drive on one PC, removing the drive and plugging it into another PC. If the data you loaded on the first PC has mysteriously disappeared then you’ll have been supplied with a masked drive – typically the supplier will have used chips that say only have 600MB of actual storage on them and passed them off as a 1GB drive. These “masked” chips are much cheaper for them to buy so they can seemingly offer fantastic and typically unbeatable prices.

3. Flash drives that are not backed up with RoHS, CE and FCC certificates – There is a lot of legislation around that suppliers of flash drives need to comply with including the Reduction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS). Failure to comply can result in large fines to the supplier and any company that buys from them so please make sure any supplier you choose is fully compliant. Ask to see copies of their certificates to be sure.

   If a supplier has spent time and money to make sure their goods are fully compliant it’s a good indicator that they’ll also be supplying Grade A products.

USB2U RoHS, CE & FCC Certificates

To ensure you don’t get scammed when buying promotional or branded USB flash drives make sure you only deal with reputable companies who have a good trading history; can refer you to lots of happy customers; that underwrite their promises with guarantees that mean something and don’t be embarrassed about asking for copies of Certificates to check their (and their goods) compliance.

Despite all the economic gloom and doom around at the moment sales of promotional USB memory sticks continues unabated.

Printed USB Sticks

Falling demand for “old fashioned” CD’s coupled with an increase in printing costs for traditional sales brochures has encouraged companies to look at alternative options to distribute information on their products and prices.

Customised USB sticks are increasingly the solution companies opt for because:

1. Printed and customised USB memory sticks are now available for less than £2 per unit (subject to minimum quantities and type)
2. You get on-going brand exposure with USB sticks because they tend to be used by the recipient to store and carry their own personal data (after all this is what they are designed for!)
3. Postage costs to send out a DM campaign with a USB sticks are significantly cheaper than sending out expensive and heavy glossy brochures.
4. It’s far easier to take a few hundred or thousand USB sticks to a trade show than it is to transport the equivalent number of heavy brochures. Lots of brochures handed out at trade shows and exhibitions end up in the bins outside the exhibition halls – USB sticks don’t!
5. Pre-loading your sales catalogues, price lists, press releases, media files etc. onto any USB stick you hand out is a must – After all you’re paying for the storage space on the sticks so you might as well use it.

USB Data Loading

Pre-loading data onto a memory sticks purchased for your company makes good commercial sense. The savings made by pre-loading data onto USB sticks rather than printing the equivalent documents can fully offset the cost of the sticks.

The process of data loading is sometimes called duplication, pre-loading, copying or replication. It is relatively easy to do but it can be time consuming and you need to plan ahead to allow enough time to get the data organised. Ideally get your USB stick supplier to do the data-load for you – most will offer a free data load up to a certain amount, typically 100MB.

If you prefer you can “lock” the data that you pre-load onto the USB flash drive so that it cannot be deleted but if you want to do this you’ll have to have your data ready early as it has to be loaded and “locked” during the manufacturing process. You also need to consider that if you load too much data on the stick and don’t leave enough room for the user then they’re unlikely to use it and your brand won’t get the on-going use and exposure you have paid for.

At USB2U we have in-house professional data-duplication equipment that enables us to pre-load data on behalf of our clients.

Fashion and technology is something that hasn’t always mixed very well. In the past there have been novelty t-shirts that light up, belts that can be programmed to display letters across and trainers that light up when you walk. Although some of these inventions are pretty impressive and get a bit of attention when they first come out they never seem to last a long time. Let’s be honest, you were jealous of the kid who had the watch that could turn the TV off in class when the teacher was trying to show you a video. However, the novelty only lasted a few days and the kid stopped wearing the watch because it was too big.

4GB USB Cufflinks

We have noticed a few people trying to start the trend of using USB flash drives as a fashion accessory. A few months ago we came across a German music video with the artist wearing an excessive amount of twister USB memory sticks as jewellery and now we have found some USB cufflinks.

Branded USB Executive Pen Flash Drive

The USB cufflinks aren’t notably bigger than standard cufflinks and are 2GB each making a total of 4GB. They are available in gunmetal and gold finishes which go well with almost any coloured shirt.  At extra cost the flash drive cufflinks can also be engraved making them a very fashionable branded USB memory stick. The designers call this invention ‘functional fashion’ however, like a few of the examples above some things should never be mixed. One example for the usefulness of the cufflink flash drives given, is: ‘your important presentations and documents will never be forgotten again’. The natural question however is; how do you keep your cuffs tidy when your links are plugged into the computer? Giving a presentation with one sleeve rolled up or tied together with a paperclip isn’t ideal. Nevertheless the retailers must have a lot of confidence in the product because they are asking $195 (around £120) per pair for this functional fashion.

We believe that there are many more ‘functional’ and ‘fashionable ways to always have your important presentations and documents at hand. Take for example our branded USB Pen flash drives, not only do we offer a selection of different styles that can be customised, it is also a fully functional writing pen. Then there is our range of leather USB flash drives that are professional, sleek and timelessly fashionable. Along with most of our range of USB flash drives, the USB keys fit nicely onto a key ring making them easily portable. It’s settled then, it doesn’t cost £120 to have functional and portable USB fashion.