Boardy: A Useful USB Gimmick for Once

During the last few Greener Gadgets competitions eco-gadget geeks have been privy to some pretty outlandish concepts and whole-hearted but half-baked ideas. From manual printers running on coffee grounds to a wallet that represents your biggest eco-vice the annual green gadget awards gets some pretty outlandish ideas. And so the notion of a USB drive made out of cardboard would seem to fit right in with other such noble but impractical concepts. Except this isn’t a concept, it’s an actual, factual product being produced.

Going by the name of Boardy, this ingenious marketing tool is made from recycled paper and a minute amount of circuitry. It somewhat resembles a matchbook when it’s in its folded form. The design readily cuts down on plastics and other materials while offering advertizing space that conveys a company’s commitment to being environmentally sound. The simplest implementation of a Boardy would be to use the attached cardboard to display a brief blurb about a company with the inclusion of additional documents on the attached drive (one can only lament that such technology wasn’t available when AOL was bombarding North America with an unyielding horde of non-combustible CDs on a weekly basis). Indeed, in-store demos and product trials may never be the same again.

Such technology could even be implemented in the reverse where would-be applicants could print off cover letters and include their resumes on the attached drive. Or consider party invitations where you just plug-in the invite to find the exact address and other web-related details.

Of course one of the drawbacks is that as eco-friendly as the Boardy is, it nevertheless uses materials where an entirely digital delivery system may be just as viable. That being said, the product may make for an intuitive transitional tool as we attempt to move from paper to paperless content delivery methods. The fact that the Boardy is not simply a concept but a realized product also gives hope to other would-be eco-revolutionizers.

Boardy via Source