Over 1 million Chinese made digital picture frames to be recalled due to spontaneous fire hazard.

Fires break out in Digital Picture Frames
Over 1 million Chinese made digital picture frames to be recalled due to spontaneous fire hazard.

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2008-07-03 00:23:21 - Over 1 million digital picture frames are being turned back at U.S. ports as instances of a high rate of spontaneous fires are being reported in hundreds of digital picture frames sold through the retail and promotional products sector. The Chinese made digital picture frames are being returned before being off-loaded at ports in Seattle, Long Beach and New York.


'The recent surge in popularity of the digital picture frame has increased the number of vendors in China exponentially' states John Graham of USB Digital Frames. 'With this increase in the manufacturing base we are seeing a lot of unqualified companies trying to cash in on the craze. The problems we are seeing are that many vendors are using substandard
and potentially dangerous components. These sub-grade components have been running at very high temperatures and have been catching fire'.


The frames in question are being sold as entry price level models at retailers such as Best Buy and Wal-mart. They are branded under many generic names but are commonly using operating systems and LCD screens not engineered for the high volume usage that most digital picture frames operate under. Office fires reported in Freehold New Jersey, Greenwood Colorado and throughout the country have caused major property damage. The source of these fires has been traced back to the faulty digital picture frames.

USB Digital Frames long ago recognized the hazard in these sub standard components and switched to the purpose-built frames and screens used by the popular Kodak, HP and Dell digital frames. The technical solution included a high end Amlogic board and LG Electronics LCD screen. The faulty screens have been traced back to Sun Plus Technology whose screens and O/S was originally designed for portable DVD's.

Flash Drive Direct Featured Flash Drive Direct Gets The Nod From Seattle Softw... February, 2008 @ 1888PressRelease.com

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Flash Drive Direct contemplates suing Custom USB

Flash Drive Direct, a leading supplier of flash drives and digital picture frames to the ASI and PPAI promotional products industry is considering legal action against USB Custom.

USB Custom, a supplier that sells their flash drives to both distributors and end users has launched a web site Flash DRIVES Direct..(plural S). This is in direct response to the inroads Flash Drive Direct has made into the legitimate marketplace and in taking business away from USB Custom.

"The effort by USB Custom to masquerade as Flash Drive Direct has back-fired" states John Graham. "Daily we are getting customers who are calling us to order styles that are listed on their "fake web site Flash Drives Direct". We have actually picked up business as a result of their underhanded ways".

Legal action in the form of a cease and desist order, has been considered but only for the reasons that Flash drive direct wants to maintain their market integrity. USB Custom is known for selling to their customers customer and does not have a high ethical rating in the promotional products industry.

Record your vinyl records to a flash drive.

How cool is this....? record your old Led Zeppelin albums onto a flash drive and then transfer to your MP3 Player
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhfEONUp5n0

Flash Drive Direct hires long-time promotional products expert

Flash Drive Direct hires long-time promotional products expert, John Graham, to head their North American Division.
PASADENA, CALIFORNIA July 06, 2007 Public Relations News
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(PRLEAP.COM) ETC (Eco Tech Certified) Flash Drive Direct announces it has hired long-time promotional products expert John Graham to run its North American operations. John Graham has nearly 15 years of experience in the promotional products industry. He is a member of PPAI and ASI and has written numerous articles for many promo and marketing magazines. He has dealt with all of the major players in the ad specialty industry including Corporate Express, Image Seller and many others.

Flash Drive Direct http://www.Flashdrivedirect.com is touted as one of the leaders in the field of USB innovation and in particular Flash Drive technology. Flash Drive Direct is ETC certified giving it an ECO-Friendly designation. The designations comes about as a result of new technology that shows that the use of Flash Drive Direct USB drives provide an enormous savings of energy used in both the manufacture and power used to encrypt data on the drive versus the power used in writeable CD technology.

Graham goes on to explain “ We all think of eco-friendly as picking up trash and reducing our use of natural resources. What we don’t think about is the use of energy and how that affects the environment. When a Flash Drive is constructed it consumes about the same amount of energy and petrochemicals than it takes to produce a writeable CD. However, a writeable CD (over 1 billion sold in North America last year alone) takes enormous amounts of energy to burn the info onto the disc. Multiply this use of energy (energy produced by coal, natural gas or hydro electricity) by the thousands of CDs that a business might use in the course of a year and your energy consumption skyrockets. On the other hand the near Zero energy used to transfer information onto a Flash Drive is almost undetectable.”

“Flash Drive Direct is the only company with the Eco-Tech certification for their Flash Drives as far as I know“ states Graham. “FDD wants to be known not only for its fashion forward design styles but also for its environmental strategy, I think they have achieved that and more!”

To find out more contact the writer at the information below.

Flash Drive Direct’s new NAND Flash technology uses less than 1% of the energy as conventional CD

Flash Drive Direct’s new NAND Flash technology uses less than 1% of the energy as conventional CD
Home | Release Features | Success Stories | Release Tips | Journal | FAQ | Search | Submit Release | Members' Area
News Archive > 2008 > Feb > 24

Flash Drive Direct’s new NAND Flash technology uses less than 1% of the energy as conventional CD technology. Are Flash Drives the eco-answer?

Smartblast and Flash Drive Direct join forces

Press Release: Smartblast and Flash Drive Direct join forces to test new DigiCatalog software.

SMARTBLAST PARTNERS WITH YESMAIL and FLASH DRIVE DIRECT – INCREASING RESPONSE RATES ALL AROUND

PRESS RELEASE

March 19, 2008

SMARTBLAST PARTNERS WITH YESMAIL and FLASH DRIVE DIRECT – INCREASING RESPONSE RATES ALL AROUND

CHICAGO, IL. – SmartBlast announces its new partnership with YesMail. Yesmail™ (an infoUSA®company, [NASDAQ: IUSA], a recognized industry-leading provider of permission-based online email marketing solutions and Smartblast, the leading provider of email marketing services to the promotional products industry have partnered to help ensure the best possible delivery of e-blasts to SmartBlast customers.
SmartBlast clients have already experienced an improvement in delivery rates, sample requests and orders. “Our overall results have improved by 23% during the past month,” states John Graham of Flash Drive Direct. “Our opens have increased by 37%, our return rate went up to 22% and our ROI increased dramatically. In fact during one of our return sessions our internal mail server crashed due to the sheer volume of mail.”
Michael Johnston, president of Smartblast, states, “By switching our mail provider to Yesmail, the increase in responses that our customers have experienced has been phenomenal.” The mission of SmartBlast has always been to help clients improve their response rates, build customer relationships, grow revenue and increase the relevancy and impact of every message they send. “Yesmail is just another way for us to provide our customers with the best service possible,” explains Johnston.
About SmartBlastSmartBlast.com, based in Chicago, IL, is the leading provider of email marketing services to the promotional products industry. In addition to email, SmartBlast also provides direct mail solutions, list management services and eCatalog solutions.

About YesmailYesmail is an infoUSA company and is part of the infoUSA services group, which includes sister companies Walter Karl, Millard, Edith Roman and Catalog Vision. infoUSA is a $700 million public company with more than 4 million customers and has been profitable for over 30 years. infoUSA is a publicly traded company on NASDAQ: iusa.
About Flashdrive Direct
Flash Drive Direct is a North American based flash drive design and manufacturing firm. They cater to the promotional products market, corporate and retail markets with their innovation promotional flash drive designs. They have offices in Canada, USA and a manufacturing facility in Shenzen, China.
SmartBlast
314 W. Institute Place
Suite 3W
Chicago, IL 60610
CONTACT: Michael Johnston, President
312-587-8489, mjohnston@smartblast.com
Flash Drive Direct
12500 Horseshoe Way
Vancouver Canada
604-272-8809 jg@flashdrivedirect.com

Flash drive direct gets energy star designation

Energy Star designation and TCO 2008 Certification awarded to flash drive design firm Flash Drive Direct.
Energy Star was initially only a United States government program to promote energy efficient consumer products. However during the past decade it has spread throughout Canada, Australia and a dozen other countries. It is well known for its blue logo appearing on many computer products and peripherals.
TCO Certification is a series of product certifications for office equipment (most notably monitors). It is set by TCO Development, owned by the Swedish Confederation of Professional Employees. The Certifications are named after years. Although commonly associated with computer monitors, later TCO revisions also defined standards for computers, keyboards, printers, flash drives mobile phones and more.
In January of 2008 Flash Drive Direct applied for and was today granted final certification for both the Energy Star program and the more European-based TCO Develepement certificate.
“We felt it was enormously important not just for us but for the industry as a whole to achieve these certifications. I do not think people truly understand the positive impact that flash drives are having on the environment.” states John Graham, corporate communications officer for Flash Drive Direct. “ We see a a tremendous power savings, a decline in raw material usage and a much smaller post-consumer waste footprint”.
In a recent study, it was discovered that the energy expounded when a CD is burned on a conventional PC compared to the energy consumed in the transfer of the same data load to a USB Flash Drive was on average over 500% less. The study also showed that the energy and petrochemicals consumed in the making of a conventional CD was 1.78 times more when compared to the energy and plastics consumed in the construction of the average Flash Drive.
Considering that 97% of all CD sales are for 1 time use (non-rewritable) and that nearly half of all CD’s are used only 1.3 times (on average) for the simple transfer of data from 1 computer to another, if you compare that large amount of energy consumed to the small eco-footprint of a Flash Drive it is easy to see how these relatively simple devices have been able to achieve such high environmental standards. I 2007 an estimated 4 billion used CD’s ended up in land fills
This past fall Flash Drive Direct also reached RoHS and WEEE compliancy.
For more information on this story please contact the press liaison.

The secret is out. Flash Drive Direct style flash drives with logo to be used to replace key lock in Mazda

Who'da thought it'd be possible, but Mazda of all companies has embraced the inner geek inside me to make me want to run out and test drive one of their cars.

Thankfully this is only a concept car for now as might want to plunk down the 30,000$ to buy it.

The car, designed for "net-savvy youngsters" is the new concept hatchback, Mazda Sassou, it ditches the traditional cylinder lock key system in favor of USB flash drives.

In addition to starting the engine, the flash drives can be used to transfer driving directions for long trips along with the latest songs for the day to the Sassou's internal hard drive.

Just be sure to vent the windows though, it looks like the extra large sunroof would literally cook any electronics you have in the car during your lunch break.

This next step in flash drive revolution may help to benefit companies like Flash Drive Direct who design specific styles and then manufacture them for clients as an OEM product......

Keep you posted

16 GB Flash Drive. Industry largest flash drive capacity

Vancouver CanadaRelease - Flash Drive Direct launches line of 16GB hand held flash drives for the promotional products market.The $16 Billion dollar (annual sales) US promotional products industry is getting a 16GB boost.

Flash Drive Direct is now offering Windows Readyboost 16 GB hand held flash drive units.“We only expect this upward memory trend to continue,” states John Graham, North American director of Flash Drive Direct. “ This business was mostly 32 MB promotional give-aways 2 years ago, now the sale of the flash drives into the US business economy is trending towards much larger memory drives. A year ago, 1GB was the upper end, 6 months ago we hit 8GB and now we are at 16GB.

We can expect to see 32GB within the next 6 months”Flash Drive Direct is now Windows ReadyBoost deliverable.Adding system memory (typically referred to as RAM) is often the best way to improve a PC’s performance, since more memory means more applications are ready to run without accessing the hard drive. However, upgrading memory can be difficult and costly, and some machines have limited memory expansion capabilities, making it impossible to add RAM.

Windows Vista introduced Windows ReadyBoost, a new concept in adding memory to a system this past year. It means the user can use flash memory, such as that on a (USB) flash drive, to improve performance without having to add additional hard-wired memory.The flash memory device serves as an additional memory cache—that is, memory that the computer can access much more quickly than it can access data on the hard drive. Windows ReadyBoost relies on the intelligent memory management of Windows Super Fetch and can significantly improve system responsiveness.

Windows ReadyBoost is simple to use. When a removable Flash Drive memory device is first inserted into a port, Windows Vista checks to see if its performance is fast enough to work with Windows ReadyBoost. If so, the user is asked if they want to use this device to speed up system performance. The user can choose to allocate part of a USB drive’s memory to speed up performance and use the remainder to store files.Flash Drive Direct is one of the first suppliers to offer this to the ad specialty marketplace.

The secrets of flash drive marketing to the corporate world revealed.

How to Sell Flash Drives to the Promotional Marketplace.
Please don’t take this as an insult to your sales skills or a reflection of my ability to be right 98% of the time. :) Its just that I have worked both sides of the business and with so many things to sell, it always took me while to learn how to sell something new. I remember when Pima cotton first came out, I described it as a fabrication designed by Puma and this was the wicking version. Doh!
So I figured a sharing a few basics bits of knowledge about selling any Flash Drive (especially our Flash Drive Direct drives) wouldn’t hurt.......
1) What is a flash drive: A flash drive is a memory device for storing data. This includes, files, word docs, pictures, video. ANYTHING that can go on a computer can go on a flash drive.
2) It has NO MOVING parts: Beauty eh? No moving parts means no break downs.....no blue screen of death. Your PC and Mac has a Hard Drive which spins around at about a jillion revolutions per minute and has an arm (just like a turntable arm) that retrieves the data. Compare the 2....1) never breaks down......The other) will break down...it just depends on when.
3) A flash drive has NAND Flash memory? Who cares! To sell it you don’t need to know this....what you need to know is that there are 2 chips in each drive.....a)the memory chip and b) controller chip. What is important to know is that the chips are THE BEST. The only reliable mass produced chips are made by SAMSUNG and HYNIX. All of our drives are made from these chips. If you buy a drive that is not made with Samsung or Hynix you are buying crap. Simple!
4) Tier 1, USB 2.0, recycled memory, Tier 1, Windows Vista and MAC ready....what does this mean and why you should care?Simply put....a reliable quality flash drive MUST have USB 2.0 (this is a faster speedier chip) Tier 1 (means it is professional grade) Windows Vista and Mac ready...(This means the drive will run with these operating systems.....if it doesn’t have this designation you may have problems)
Recycled/re-used/Tier 2 Memory: Personally I don’t know ( or want to know) any supplier who will tell you they sell this. Why? Because it is crap.....It will fail and no one will tell you....”Buy mine...its junk”. So why do you need to worry about this? Call it what you will.... recycled memory, whatever.... it is basically “factory seconds” that didn’t make the Quality Control standards. They are often sold on a “Gray Market”.
So how do you know? 1) Ask...2) The Price....Chip prices are commodity driven and prices go up and down....all reputable flash drive makers (such as us) price the wholesale according to the chip prices that day. If you are buying a 100 pieces of a 1GB for $10-12 dollars (as I write this) then it is likely you have Tier 1 USB 2.0 Samsung/Hynix chips......If someone says you can have it for $7 ......walk away, it is probably junk.
The emotional sell, the reasons why your clients should buy Flash Drives?
Now that we have all of the geeky techy junk out of the way...trust me I could have gone on and on...and on.......you don’t sell on technical issues do you...(its just a good thing to know)?.....you sell on emotion...you must present a good reason for someone to buy what you have to sell.........fortunately Flash Drives actually have some great legit reasons for corporations to buy them.....here are just a few.
1) They can be reused up to a million times: (yes someone actually counted it) this means that their logo will be seen forever! You can’t say that about Bang Sticks.
2) They are VERY USEFUL: They can hold 1000’s of files so they can be transferred to another computer, act as a back-up for safety, put their powerpoints and other presentations on it, put pictures, music files and just about anything else from your computer on it.
3) They are an EXCELLENT business tool: Not only can they do what’s descrived above, they can do a number of other things. PRELOADS, this is when files, presentations and more can be loaded onto the drive by the supplier. This way when the drives are given away/sold the recipient will have a fully loaded presentation. These are perfect for tradeshows, corporate identity building, fund raising, team building and more....MANUALS, BUSINESS REPORTS and more........forget about the expense, time and ecological bad karma when a corporation prints a 100 page report on business. Face facts:......With a business report, the summary gets skimmed over and then....into the circular file it goes. Flash drives help save the ecology.........when their initial use is no longer valid the user just erases the files and uses it to store their Captain and Tenille MP 3’s. Simple.
4) Bigger is Better: DO NOT SELL 64 MB, 128 MB or 256 MB Flash drives.....they are too small. They are not proportionately cheaper by a long shot and the people who recieve them have no use for them. They will chuck them in a drawer. If you want to give your client something they will be happy with and that you can be proud to sell......sell them a 1 GB or higher.....they are a great deal....big enough to hold lots of information and most importantly....people will use them.
That’s the basics......there are always lots of new twists and turns with this technology....new uses and new venues for sales....but I hope the above gives you a small bit of knowledge to help you feel more comfortable about selling flash drives.

Things to know when Selling a Flash Drive Direct Flash Drive...! We make it simple.1) Minimums: Minimum orders of any memory or style is 100 pieces.2) What do you get: With each order the price includes your logo (up to 3 colors), lanyard and gift box. We can add keyrings etc, just ask.3) Pricing: Each level of memory on the Dynamic line is the same price...it doesn’t matter what the thing looks like. So every 1 GB is the same wholesale price.....there are price breaks at 500 and 1000....anything over that amount call for a quote. The Premiere Line is slightly more expensive (about 10%) but even there every 1 GB is the same price as all other Premiere styles.4) Payment: Credit Card, MC or Visa unless terms or other arrangements have been made. 5) Delivery: On average is 14 days from APPROVAL OF ARTWORK...(ie SIGNOFF).6) Artwork: EPS or AI is acceptable saved for PC.7) Artwork Charges: We screenprint or laser engrave (we do not pad print, pad printing rubs off!) On orders under 500 there is a $150 (a) artwork charge. After 500. No Charge. This will pay for up to 3 colors. All at the same price. The only variations to this charge are on a ) THE RUBY...it is a full digital photo process and the set up can and will vary. Call for a quote. b) Our new 4 color screen process. This duplicates an exact printing process with bleeds, fades etc. This is $200 (a).8) Shipping from us to you: A 2 day air-freight from Seattle or Vancouver all the way across the country is about 30 cents per drive. Use tha as a good place to estimate from.9) Other charges: None.......simple!

Thanks

Falling chip prices may keep flash drive prices low. Hynix faces 4th quarter loss.

Hynix Semiconductor Inc. posted its worst quarterly performance in four years Friday due to falling chip prices in an oversaturated market.
Hynix, the world's second-largest memory chip maker by sales, said it lost 467 billion won ($496 million) in the three months ended Dec. 31, compared with 1.02 trillion won during the same period last year.
It was the company's worst quarterly net loss since the fourth quarter of 2003, and far worse than the 53.5 billion won ($56.8 million) analysts polled by Thomson Financial had expected.
"The industry will remain challenging in the first quarter of this year as weak pricing may persist," O.C. Kwon, Hynix's senior for strategic planning, said during a conference call.
Sales during the quarter at the Icheon, South Korea-based company fell 35 percent to 1.73 trillion won ($1.84 billion) from 2.66 trillion won in the last quarter of 2006.
Reflecting the gloomy industry outlook, Hynix cut its capital spending plan for this year by 25 percent to 3.6 trillion won ($3.8 billion), down from 2007's 4.8 trillion won.
For full-year 2007, net profit plunged 84 percent to 329 billion won ($348.7 million), while sales rose 11 percent to 8.43 trillion won ($8.95 billion).
Prices of memory chips _ such as DRAM, or dynamic random access memory, used in personal computers and NAND flash used in MP3 players and digital cameras _ have fallen steeply, leading most chip makers to post losses for the October-December quarter.
Analysts say those losses may extend through the first and second quarter of 2008, adding that profitability could improve in the second half on stronger seasonal demand.
"In terms of both earnings and chip prices, the first quarter should be the bottom for the industry and Hynix," said C.W. Chung, a Seoul-based analyst at Lehman Brothers.
"Losses at Hynix are expected to widen in the current quarter, but will be narrowed in the second quarter and then the company will possibly return to a profit in the third quarter," Chung said.
Hynix's DRAM sales prices fell 35 percent sequentially in the fourth quarter from the third, with 7 percent on-quarter growth in shipments. NAND flash chip prices declined 34 percent, although shipments grew 47 percent on strong demand for MP3 players and mobile phones.
DRAM shipments accounted for 60 percent of total sales in the fourth quarter, down from 67 percent in the third and 75 percent in the fourth quarter of 2006.

Flash Drive Direct goes on to Billboard

The CD is dead. Flash Drive Direct offers strong alternative paradigm to revive limp retail music sales.

The CD is dead and the industry is facing the prospect of a download only era. Music industry mavens know that this business strategy is not suited to the labels. The free file sharing Peer to Peer genie is out of the bottle and already in the hands of the public. The ability for the labels to stake their claim in the download arena and successfully compete with LimeWire, MySpace and other free services is doomed. Flash drive designer and manufacturer Flash Drive Direct has penned a treatise that describes a new and viable replacement for the CD that will appeal to the download demographic and offer a richer media intense delivery system.
Vancouver, Canada (Billboard Publicity Wire/PRWEB ) February 14, 2008 -- The CD is dead. Sales have plummeted nearly 50% over the last 4 years and a whole generation of consumers are now no longer even familiar with the CD as a concept or the idea that a record store is the place to find the "next big thing".
Record labels have reacted either by standing by and watching as the retail industry tanks or by litigating to death their very own consumers in a futile effort to put the download genie back in the bottle.
Helvetica, sans-serif; TEXT-DECORATION: none" href="http://www.flashdrivedirect.com/" alt="Link to website">This generation wants to buy its music, what they don't want to buy is a CD "This generation wants to buy its music, what they don't want to buy is a CD," states John Graham, long-time music industry analyst and current director of Flash Drive Direct design and manufacturing house (http://www.flashdrivedirect.com/). "What the labels have failed to recognize is that the download consumer still wants to buy a tangible tactile product. They are the wealthiest youth generation in history with an estimated annual disposable income of over 20 billion dollars. They lay claim to some of the largest discretionary retail spending. Note the sales of Mac's, iPods, cell phones, $200 jeans and more," concludes Graham.
"The retail experience for the download generation is alive and kicking. The difference is that today's downloaders grew up on MP3 files not CD's," Graham goes on to say. "When MP'3's came along they were first played almost exclusively on computers. However, necessity being the Mother of all inventions, retailers then created the MP3 player industry. As a result the CD player and the CD retail business went the way of the Dodo."
A recent Harvard study on retail trends cited an anomaly in the download generation's retail therapy that was not anticipated. It found that consumers 14-29 would buy music from a retail outlet if two things were changed. One being that the retail environment better represented their personal expression of taste and secondly that if the music were loaded onto a digital device such as a flash drive they would buy it.
The study went on to say that on a secondary level of understanding "the consumer had veered away from the CD as it offered little in the way of new media interactivity". The consumer had found that the CD only offered a 1 dimensional experience and had no "bells and whistles".
John Graham of Flash Drive Direct goes on to explain, "the problem with the CD in recent years was not just a lack of a solid CD's worth of material but the high cost the consumer paid for what amounted to nothing more than a $15 expense for 1-2 singles, a bunch of filler and no killer! The labels only have themselves to blame for much of this."
The new delivery device that will recapture the spirit of the vibrant 80's and 90's CD sales boom is the digital flash drive. To date many artists have released limited edition and on-line sales of flash drive albums. However, there were 2 consistent failures in these tentative approaches. Firstly the retail environment had no rack space to best showcase the drives and perhaps more importantly the artist and labels did not grasp the enormous range of expression that the flash drive offered.
The drive would contain the tunes but what has not been fully understood was what else the flash drive offers. The drive not only delivers songs but videos, print files of all of the artist's previous CD covers, tour posters, band bio's and more. It also could easily be formatted to link to outside websites where the consumer could buy tickets, visit the band's website, download coupons and link to a wide variety of on-line and real world experiences. The flash drive is much more impactful as a retail tool when viewed as a web portal, multi- media storage and song delivery device than just a mere replacement for the CD, as the CD was for the LP.
Flash Drive Direct does work for the corporate world along with new media ventures with record labels, film studios, television and more.