Although it's been said many times, many ways...

Here at Addison Technologies we are gearing up for Christmas, like many others. We've made our lists, wrapped our gifts, or procrastinated until the last minute, depending on who you're talking about. And so, in order to let you, dear reader, get to know us all a bit better, here are the things that we would love for Santa to place under our tree:

A vacation to Alaska that includes Heli-Skiing (for those at home following along, that's where you jump out of a perfectly good helicopter at the top of a mountain to land and ski down).














Indoor Olympic Swimming pool

















Two additional employees for Addison Tech















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Lamborghini Sesto Elemento
















NFL Tryout

















Robots

















Private island in Fiji (and a house/helipad/dock to go on it)

















Round trip to visit the ISS (bring us t-shirts from the giftshop if you get this one)



















Aston Martin V12 Vantage












Bonus Points if you can match the gift with the AT employee: Brad, Woody, Keith, Corey, and Ann.

Merry Christmas, From Addison Tech, to you!

IE Users and IQ

Start stretching out your fingers, I know the complaint comments will be written, even as I write this. But I read a small article on slashdot about Internet Explorer users, and their intelligence. No, no, not the hoax that went around, that IE users were less intelligent. This is a study about the Risk Intelligence of IE users.

Now, before I even give you a cute little link to go and check out the study, I'm going to cover my hindquarters. We may find out this, too, is a hoax for all I know. their site is certainly nothing to look at (we at AT could help them out with that...I'm just sayin.) And I have not looked through any of their data to see if they're being honest or not. But even they tell you that it's not a scientific study, and they had a small pool to work from. So don't gripe at me, all right?

Right. Now, here's your link.

Their risk intelligence study asked true/false questions, and had the participants answer the question and rate how confident they were in the answer. 100 = they were sure it was right, 50 = they were only kinda sure, 0 = not sure at all. Not rocket surgery. And out of the participants, the Internet Explorer users scored the worst. Go ahead, flame me now. But, I'll tell you, this does help enlighten things. Like the fact that my mom would call and ask if the pop-up proclaiming "Your Anti-Virus Isn't Working!" was legitimate, when she used IE *. Does it mean that IE users are more trusting, and that the rest of the users are more cynical? I'm not sure on that, but I would be interested to see a larger, scientific study done. Assuming that this one isn't a hoax as well.


^{*It's a moot point now, as we have my mother using Linux. Booya.}

Are You Listening?

We've covered a lot of social media themed ground around here, gotten on some kicks, and beaten a few drums. All for worthy causes, but for what good? Sure, your password will be safe (what do you mean that your password isn't a 16 character alphanumeric and special character acronym? Gah!) and your company has a nice, complete social media policy that everyone's signed and familiar with (right? right...) but what after that? Well, as this article points out, if you don't then listen, you've just waisted a lot of time. Social media isn't just sitting at a keyboard, talking into an abyss. It's about listening to what your customers/clients/users/prospects say back to you. And, I can't emphasise this enough, it's about listening to both the good and the bad. Listen. Hear and take into consideration the bad that is said. Try to analyse what is going wrong, and fix that. Let your consumers know that you've heard them, and are working to fix whatever the error may be. At the same point, listen to what is right, and try not to screw that up, shall we? I've seen many products "improved" badly, when they were perfectly fine to begin with (New Coke, anyone?)

Ignoring what your consumer says about your company, your brand, is nothing but disaster awaiting. Back in the pre-social media days, it was said that one person would tell 80 others about a bad experience. Now, that number is not capped at 80. Nor is the number limited for the amount of people that will see your praises sung. Listen, be helpful and attentive to your clients, and you will see the benefits.