Hasta La Gadget!

Most people don’t use USB flash drives for disposable information: after all, there’s e-mail for that – but if you’re looking for a cheap alternative to giving out traditional plastic flash drives, the designers at Art Lebedev (you know, makers of the now famous Optimus Maximus Keyboard) have an idea: what if you could buy a sheet of cardboard flash drives, rip one off, drop some data on it, and then hand it out or get rid of it when you’re finished? Thus, the cardboard flash drive was born. 

They’re still a design, but Art Lebedev has mockups of 8GB and 16GB versions of the things, that come in neat little rows connected with perforated cardboard for easy separation and a blank space on the top you can use to print the name of your company or a reference to the data you have on the drive. Presumably using cardboard creates less waste in the long run, because the cardboard is recyclable and breaks down naturally, while thick plastic housings will be around for thousands of years. 

Still, it would be difficult to resist the urge to hang on to a 16GB flash drive, even if it were made out of cardboard. There’s no timeline for whether these will ever be a real product or how much it would cost if it were, but it’s not hard to see people who would want to use these to replace press kits or business cards at trade shows.