THANK YOU!!  

On November 16th, we were honored to be voted top Professional Service Provider of the Year at the Capitol Hill Chamber of Commerce's Hilly Awards.  We love what we do and so we are thrilled when you tell us you love it too.  

You can read the full list of winners here, or watch it below.  DC Access is at the 2:00 minute mark (including a classic Matt & Martha photo).

2013 Hilly Award Winners & Runners Up

Matt and Martha accept their Hilly Award from Jen DeMayo of the Atlas Performing Arts Center

This holiday, its likely you'll be taking lots of photos and uploading them to Facebook to share with friends and family.  What you might not be completely familiar with is how Facebook may use your profile photo and information about your interactions with brands on the site to advertise to your friends and family too.

This August, Facebook updated their "Statement of Rights and Responsibilities" policy to clarify how they may utilize your personal information on the site.  The major clarification was that they may use a thumbnail of your profile picture alongside an ad for a brand that you've Liked on the site in order to promote that brand in your friends' news feeds.  The idea is that if you Like a brand, then your friends may too.  Chances are you have seen this in your own news feed already.

If you don't want your profile picture or social information used for this type of ad, it is relatively simple to opt out:  Under "Privacy Settings" click "Ads" on the left hand menu.  From there, you can edit the settings to opt out of this type of advertising.  

What you cannot do, however, is opt out of Sponsored Stories.  That is when companies pay for your interaction with their brand to receive prime placement in the news feed of your friends.  But, your profile picture and social information will never show up in the news feed of a stranger.

For more details and to see examples of ads and Sponsored Stories, read this blog post (which was our source for this article).

This holiday season, whether you're traveling or hosting friends and family at your home, you are likely to find yourself in need of some video entertainment.  So, should you stream or should you download? The answer depends on your circumstance.

If you want something to watch on a plane or a location that won't have wifi access, downloading is definitely the way to go.  The movie or TV show is saved on your device and ready for playback.  You'll need to plan ahead, though.  If you rent or buy something from a download service like iTunes (Amazon also offers a download option), it can take several hours to transfer the content to your computer or tablet.  So choose what you want ahead of time and start the download the day before.  (Note:  If you rent an HD movie on iPad, you may need access to wifi when you start the movie in order to activate the rental countdown clock.  This seems to only be a quirk with iTunes HD on iPad, though.) 

If you need more versatile options - something to keep little ones busy until Thanksgiving dinner is served AND one of those "my family is crazy during the holidays" comedies later in the evening - and you have access to a quality wifi signal (like our 3Mbps/512kbps service available for $54.99/mo), then streaming can save the day.  Content providers like Hulu, Netflix and Amazon send content to your device in continuous batches, so it is available on demand but doesn't take up storage space on your computer or tablet. Streaming content can also be played on other hardware such as Roku, Kindle Fire, and newer versions of PlayStation and XBox.

Don't forget: for those of you who mail in your payment by check or who send checks via your online banking program, please update our address in your address book or biller profile.  Payments that go to the old address do eventually make it to the office for processing, but there is a delay of several days which can result in payments being recorded as late.  The new address is:

DC Access, LLC  

1504 Pennsylvania Ave, SE #2

Washington, DC  20003

Like    Follow   Review