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

Over 1 million Chinese made digital picture frames to be recalled due to spontaneous fires

Friday, July 4, 2008

United States of America (Press Release) July 2, 2008 -- 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.
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USB Digital Frames News and Views

Digital picture frames captivate the promotional products industry
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▼ 2008 (20)
▼ July (4)
Fires break out in Digital Picture Frames
USB Digital picture Frames News
Viruses now posing on Sunplus digital picture fram...
Over 1 million Chinese made digital picture frames...
► March (1)
Mazda adopts promotional logo flash drives for the...
► February (1)
USB Digital Picture Frames get RoHS and WEE compli...
► January (14)
Digital Dojo competes in upcoming Hawaiian Ironman...
Digital Picture Frames catch Fire
Best Buy digital picture frames infected with mali...
Think that going direct to China is a cakewalk.......
Tomorrow's Digital Frames...what to expect. Is it ...
USB Digital Frames adds first MP4 digital frame an...
Consumer Reports on the Digital Picture Frame
How to deal with a client who goes direct to China...
USB Digital Frames awarded ROHS and WEE compliancy...
Gizmo Central explains the USB Digital Frame
BBC review about the news on USB Digital Frames.
How to Sell USB Digital Picture Frames to the Prom...
What makes digital picture frames work?
USB Digital Frames. An introductory explanation.
Who am I ?

USB Digital Frames acquired by Flash Drive Direct

Flash Drive Direct of Vancouver Canada has acquired digital picture frame designer USB Digital Frames. A major makeover and product re-launch is planned.USB Digital Frames is a leading designer and programmer in the very fast paced digital picture frame industry.

It was launched a year ago and has agreements in place with Panasonic to supply the hard to find Hi-resolution LCD panels. It currently offers 15 models ranging in size from 1.1 inch screens to 22 inch screens.

Flash Drive Direct plans changes to the line, designs and the scope of the offering.“ We took over USB Digital Frames as it complimented our current business with Flash Drives”, says John Graham, Director of Vancouver based Flash Drive Direct. “We also recognized that some of the problems that USB Digital Frames faced were the same things we had already conquered when launching Flash Drive Direct. Simple yet important points such as easy to understand and execute user-manuals to set-up and launch the digital picture frame. On one of the current designs the first line in the Chinese translated manual instructed the user …Do not ram hard things into the drive! We realized that this was leaving far too much open for interpretation”

The USB digital picture frame is best described as the perfect gadget for sharing photos, movies, video files and mp3’s in a picture frame format. The frames range in size from 1 inch to 36 inches. They contain an LCD screen, which displays multiple file formats. It uploads files from SD cards, Flash drives, USB cable or via BlueTooth.Flash Drive Direct intends to keep the name USB Digital Frames and to keep its domain separate. There will be joint marketing initiatives as it is felt that neither of the product sets will cannibalize the other and will in fact enhance each others offering.“Our first goal is to meet with the manufacturer and with Panasonic, this is slated for next week in China.

Our goal is to streamline production, clarify operating and packaging issues and to re-launch the brand by Mid March, it is a tall order” Graham states.Both Flash Drive Direct and USB Digital Frames sell to both the retail market throughout North America and Europe and into the 16 billion dollar a year promotional products industry in North America. Last year digital picture frames and flash drives represented over $300,000,000.00 in corporate logo sales. The product re-launch is expected to set new standards for value in the marketplace, Flash Drive Direct expects sales of USB Digital Frames to triple in 2008.

And the Geek shall inherit the earth.....Flash Drives dead? MEMS and Nanoprobes next?

This is for the trully geeky........new technology will replace flash drives in the next few years.......Nano probes which can produce 100 GB's to 1000 Gb (known a terabyte for the geek in all of us) ..which will be the size or smaller than current flash drives....strap in Buck Rogers.

Will MEMS + nanoprobes succeed flash memory scaling?
Feb. 5, 2008 - With flash process technology scaling approaching its limits, along comes Nanochip, a developer of MEMS silicon data storage chips, with a technology that does not use lithography in its manufacture. The company recently completed (Jan. 22) a $14M financing round supported in part by Intel Capital and JK&B Capital, and aims to complete development of its first prototypes later this year, start design verification testing and limited customer sampling in 2009, and begin production in 2010, CEO Gordon Knight told WaferNEWS.
The company's first products are expected to exceed 100GB/chipset, reaching terabytes in the future. Because Nanochip's MEMS-based probe storage technology is mechanical in nature, i.e., with moving parts, its access times are in the millisecond range -- too slow for programmed storage. Instead, the company is targeting NAND and disk drives. "We're going after large database storage, i.e., servers, laptops, USB drives, and eventually, cell phones, when we get our costs down," explained Knight.


Currently, Nanochip has four fabs around the world working on the prototype project (two partners in the MEMS sector and two in storage media), and talks are ongoing with potential production partners. While not able to identify partners, Knight did note that the MEMS-based storage chip must be produced on 200mm wafers.

The MEMS chip itself is an ~150mm2 die based on a 3-wafer construction (see figure): a CMOS substrate containing all the electronics to control the chip and provide error correction, a substrate that contains the suspended media moving platform; and a sealing cap wafer. Each die has ~8000 cantilevers and AFM probe tips, with a single AFM probe tip on the end of each cantilever. The probe tips are grown on top of the CMOS substrate and can be raised and lowered onto the media platform, which moves in raster fashion in the X-Y directions. The media layer (i.e., recording layer) is continuous, and not patterned.

Structure of Nanochip's MEMS-based advanced memory device.
Because the media moves under suspension, there is no contact, and hence no wearout of the media, according to Knight. The probe tips, however, do contact the media. A servo controller moves the tips down into contact with the media as necessary to complete read/write operations, typically, only several hundred tips are moved at a time. Knight maintains that proper engineering of the tip material and the media surface chemistry has enabled tip life to be extended to allow very high operational usage over many years. "The media does cycle more than 10 million times and we are still testing its ultimate lifetime," he said. "The read/write/erase rate is similar to that of a disk drive in that direct overwrite is used, thus eliminating block erase issues that flash has."

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.

We have a new division of digital picture frames

Dear All,

I hope you had are having a good time in Vegas....this is the first year I have not been in a long time.....I am also not sleep deprived...so maybe its a good thing.....

We have just launched a new company USB Digital Frames We are taking a decidely simple approach to what is a confusing market place. We are doing this by offering the following

1) Only Panasonic LCD panels.......these are the best panels offering a clear, strong high resolution.

2) Simple pricing....the price includes up to a 3 color logo, in most suppliers models the buyer is required to buy extra memory.......we include it..! A 512 MB SD card comes included in the price with every frame that requires it.

3) These are the same frames and components that the top retail brands use. Yet the price is very competitive for the corporate marketplace.4) We will help you to learn about how frames work and how to sell them and what markets are the best "Slow Fat Rabbits"I hope you take a chance to check it out and drop by to see us....Thanks

John Graham