Some of you may recognize the name Joe Born from the company Neuros, whose open source products we’ve been reviewing and talking positively about for years. What you may not know is that Joe also founded the company Digital Innovations over ten years ago.  According to him, he hasn’t been “very active in it since starting Neuros, but recently they acquired a peripheral company called Micro Innovations that makes a host of commodity peripherals, and [he's] very excited about applying the Neuros open innovation formula there.”

Last night Joel and I had an opportunity to take a survey that Joe had forwarded us, showing some USB Hub concept products. Unlike some of the sillier ones that we often feature on the site – the ones which invariably get picked up when Engadget does another edition of “Crapgadget” – some of these looked both cool and functional. It’s not often that we get to see actual concepts and give our feedback, so it was a lot of fun.

Tonight, Joe surprised me by sending an email that said “I’m wondering if you’d consider featuring a 48 hour 40% off as a deal of the day for Digital Innovations. [Your readers would] have to fill out a survey (on usb hubs) to get the code, but hopefully they would find those concepts interesting too.”

I am almost positive that you will find the concepts interesting, and the 40% off is just gravy. The link to the survey is here; go tell Joe what you think.