SanDisk Cruzer USB flash drives to carry personal video messages from U.S. Military personnel to their families.

SanDisk Corporation (Nasdaq:SNDK) has announced that it is participating in a unique "phone home" program that will allow service men and women who are on leave from active duty in the Middle East to send 10-minute video clips to their families on SanDisk Cruzer Mini USB flash drives. The announcement was made in New York City, where a dozen Navy and Coast Guard ships arrive today for the start of the city's annual Fleet Week events.

SanDisk has donated 400 of the tiny flash drives to the USO (United Service Organizations) of Metropolitan New York, which is spearheading this effort as well as other activities in the city to welcome an estimated 6,000 military personnel. The sailors, Marines and Coast Guardsmen will rotate shore leave to enjoy free entertainment such as Broadway shows, sightseeing and other festivities. In many cases, their families and loved ones will not be able to make the trip to New York to join them, according to USO representatives.

So, inside a makeshift studio at the USO Center near the Port Authority docks, a team of volunteers, including network television cameramen, videographers and journalism students, will film free, 10-minute personal video messages on a first-serve basis. These will be transferred from videotape to the SanDisk Cruzer Mini USB drives, which will then be mailed to families or friends. They can watch the messages by attaching the drives to the USB ports of desktop or notebook computers. A 128-megabyte Cruzer Mini, the type donated to the USO, is the length of a stick of chewing gun but has a memory capacity exceeding that of 60 floppy disks. It can store pictures, text documents, graphics presentations, video and audio segments for many decades.

Mark Hittie, SanDisk's director of retail marketing, said that helping out the USO was "an easy call for us to make. We realize that safely storing precious photos, videos and files is extremely important to millions of people, and our flash memory products can reliably accomplish this with very small devices. The Cruzer line has been enormously popular because people can carry a USB flash drive on a key chain or wear it like a necklace. In this situation, family members can have a compact and convenient way of staying in touch. They can store a piece of their world in ours."

The catalyst for the Video Story Project is Our Living Tree, a New York-based company of personal and family historians that enables people to pass on their legacies and stories to future generations. "Our goal is to help families keep their histories and their roots alive by capturing their stories and then publishing them as oral histories, carefully-crafted books, video biographies or our unique Family Interactive CD. It's a gift from the past to the present, for the future," said Our Living Tree founder and CEO Mary Breakstone, who has 30 years of experience in Information Technology. The company's mission is explained on its web site at www.ourlivingtree.com.

She said that the telling and preservation of these stories will help bring, and keep, families together. "We expect that many of these video clips will be heartfelt and emotional," she added. Four separate film sets will be available to accommodate service personnel during the seven-day festivities, and the USO hopes to interview more than 400 sailors during Fleet Week as part of this unique event.

Also participating in The USO Video Project is DivXNetworks of San Diego, Calif., the company that created the patent-pending DivX video compression technology. DivX is working with Our Living Tree to compress the video interviews onto the SanDisk Cruzer Minis.

Hazel Cathers, Director of the New York USO, said her organization relies heavily on individual volunteers and the good will of companies to make Fleet Week a memorable and uplifting experience for the young men and women of the armed forces. A number of them have seen action in Afghanistan and Iraq, she said, and New York City is rolling out the red carpet to make them feel appreciated.

Communicating with families, said Ms. Cathers, is an ongoing challenge. "What makes this program so special is the fact that if a particular family member does not see a spouse or brother for a while, that person will have this video clip on a SanDisk Cruzer Mini and be able to pull it up at any time," she said. "It allows people to reconnect with their loved ones, bring back memories and keep them feeling close."

SanDisk, the world's largest supplier of flash memory data storage card products, designs, manufactures and markets industry-standard, solid-state data, digital imaging and audio storage products using its patented, high density flash memory and controller technology. SanDisk is based in Sunnyvale, Calif.