We’ve had two launches this week, as well as a double prize win for a group of our talented developers.

This week has also seen the launch of the new London Cardiovascular Clinic website. The London Cardiovascular Clinic is a private London cardiologist clinic offering treatment for a range of complex cardiac problems.

The new London Cardiovascular Clinic Website.

The website boasts a visually stunning interface, a customised CMS (Content Management System) and a wide range of multimedia content with a big emphasis on video content. The project was based on a responsive web design philosophy, meaning the website adapts to a range of screen resolutions, always providing an optimum experience to the user.

This week we are also pleased to officially announce the launch of Cash in Your Gadgets, an electronics recycling website which offers you money for your old devices. The website allows users to recycle a wide range of devices including mobile phones, laptops, tablets and cameras.

On the new website users will benefit from a massive database of products which Cash in your Gadgets are willing to recycle (over 6,000) as well an automated online calculator which allows you to see how much you could earn for your devices.

The Cash in your Gadgets Robot.

Cyber-Duck’s Gareth Drew, Ben Speakman and John Hamelink were double winners at the Winter Hackathon in Goodge Street, London last weekend, winning the in the Travel Planner prize and The Serious Games Institute’s Pick. The trio won a Blackberry Curve, a 6 month top-level Pusher account and $300 in BuzzDoes.com vouchers for their traffic-tracking Olympics web app which is designed to alert users with traffic and transport updates on a Google Map during the London 2012 Olympic Games.

The guys showcase their new traffic-tracking Olympics web app.

Gareth and Ben were joined by Neil Dawson earlier in the week as they attended the University of East London (UEL) to brief a group of 2nd year Multimedia and Games Design students on a new coursework project for this semester; giving them a taste of how a real-life digital agency works.

After the brief, the students were given the opportunity to brainstorm their thoughts on the project. Deadline for the pitches is the end of February when we hope to have more information on some of our favourite proposed projects.

The biggest news away from Cyber-Duck this week comes from Facebook after they announced plans to float the popular social networking website on the stock market. Facebook have stated they intend to raise $5billion (£3.16bn, 3.8bn euros) with the initial public offering (IPO) expected to be the biggest sale of shares by an internet company, creating as many as 1,000 new millionaires in the process.

Three members of the internet file sharing website Pirate Bay have been denied an appeal to the Swedish Supreme Court, meaning they are now open to jail time and fines of potentially millions of pounds. The trio are expected to pay £4.3m of fines which relate to them facilitating of the sharing of copyrighted material.

Finally we thought we would mention this month is the beginning of a new financial year in the world of Cyber-Duck. This means new targets, aspirations and goals for our clients, staff and the company itself.

The team raised a respectful £299 for the cause; a combination of the Prostate Cancer Charity, the Institute of Cancer Research and the Movember Foundation, supporting various prostate cancer and testicular cancer initiatives.

Worldwide, the initiative raised a total of £69,032,376, with the UK coming 2nd on the global Movember leaderboard with £16,746,014.

If you would like to sponsor the team, it’s not too late. Visit the Cyber-Duck Movember page and push our total up further!

Cyber-Duck’s Meetup group ‘The Digital Pond’ successfully hosted its first event from Central Working in London this Tuesday.

The ‘Node.js showcase’ gave members the opportunity to speak to and learn from some of London’s most innovative web developers. The expert panel held real life demonstrations of how they went about exploiting the potential of the pioneering server-side Javascript implementation. In addition to the array of talented guest Node.js panellists, there was free beer and pizza for all who attended.

Node.js is changing the way real-time web apps are built and developed, and although not completely new, it is something that many UK developers are not yet familiar with. With this in mind, we wanted to help teach both beginner and ‘hard-core’ web developers about the benefits.

Among the presenters were Cyber-Duck’s talented duo; John Hamelink and Gareth Drew, who spoke in detail about Cyber-Duck’s latest R&D project; Coffee Lottery. The web application is designed to put some fun into making coffee for the office. All participants, whether they’re in the office or at home, sign into the website through Twitter, before being invited to start a round; participants then have 5 minutes to register their order before Coffee Lottery selects one at random who has to make the whole lot!

While the application was built in PHP with twitter’s oAuth API, it still manages to demonstrate how Node.js can be used to add an extra sparkle to the project by enabling real-time functionality with relatively little effort. During the event the pair spoke about how they incorporated node.js into the project as well as presenting a live demonstration of Coffee Lottery in action.

Further speakers included Jonah Fox who presented brequire – a CommonJS environment for the browser, Rob Tweed who spoke about the development of Javascript/Node.js front-ends for Global Storage databases, Marek Majkowski who demonstrated the SockJS framework, Kornel Lesinski who showed us his ‘Lightsaber Centralhack’ project and Mike Cronnelly who spoke about his experiences developing and hosting two large node.js websites for News International.

Special thanks are in order for all our Sponsors of the event, which included Byng Systems, Couchbase and Clock.

We have plenty more Meetups planned for 2012 in user experience, marketing and development; feel free to join the Digital Pond Meetup page to ensure you stay up to date.

After a year filled with more accolades than any year before, we’ve clinched yet another in the form of the ‘Best use of Technical Information‘ Construction Marketing Award. Keeping with the Cyber-Duck tradition of striving to produce the most superior user experience and design combined with best-in-class technology, we created an amazing native iPad application for Optima.

The ducks stood on the stage alongside Christian Mabey and Laura Jameson of Optima to collect the award at the CMA’s last night. Winning at the CMA’s has become an annual occurrence, with the Cyber-Duck team taking an award at three of the last four events.

In 2008 we took home ‘Best Use of a Website’ for Optima Systems, and the same accolade was ours in 2010; this time for OAG (part of Optima Group). This year we took the honour in the ‘Best use of Technical Information’ category, which is all about utilising technical information as a “key part of marketing communications” according the CiM (Chartered Institute of Marketing), the CMA organisers.

The award was presented to Optima and the ducks by Richard Watkins of Ogilvy for production of the iPad application which allows iPad users to access extensive technical guides and manuals on Optima’s range of partitioning products.

This is an achievement we’re really proud of and we are already planning new projects for Optima which we hope will make it a fourth year in a row for 2012.

Lots of exciting events and conferences are lined up for the ducks this month as well as the launch of the Cyber-Duck ‘Pondcast’.

Following the successful test of last week, the Ducks have recorded their first podcast to be released on Monday. The new Cyber-Duck “Pondcast” will feature the latest tech news, gadgets, reviews and interviews.

In this week’s Podcast the team of Gil, John, Gareth and Neil discuss the Launch of Battlefield 3, the prospect of a new Apple TV and the new Google native iOS app being pulled from the app store. You can listen to the Podcast by downloading it from iTunes on Monday, so why not have a listen and let us know what you think.

Congratulations are in order for two members of the UX team as @neildawson and @yasheng have both won a scholarship to the Mobile User Experience conference at the end of November. The day will give them the opportunity to network and listen to a variety of key professionals in the mobile user experience industry.

Matt, John, Gareth, Neil and Ya Sheng will all be attending the Mozilla Festival; A three-day conference and hackfest for open web developers, journalists and media educators. The Mozilla Festival takes place annually and this year the theme is ‘Media, Freedom and the Web’ allowing our talented web professionals to be as creative as possible. We will be posting pictures from the event on next week’s edition of the weekly.

Cyber-Duck are launching a new competition for developers which aims to spark creativity and ingenuity among the digital world. Participants will be asked to submit an open source project for review under the general topic of travel. Entries will be judged on technical merit, creativity and user experience. For all those interested stay tuned every Friday to the Cyber-Duck weekly to find out more.

Planning begins for the Cyber-Duck competition.

Iain Lobban, the head of GCHQ, has stated this week that cyber-attacks on the UK are at “disturbing” levels. Throughout the year a variety of government computers as well as defence, technology and engineering firms have been targeted which prompted the government to host a two-day conference on the matter. The event was a time for senior officials to come together and discuss the rising levels of cyber-crime in the UK, which was led by Foreign Secretary William Hague.

The current news on cyber security also prompted EU and US experts to stress test their defences so that they could co-ordinate their response to any cyber-attack. The exercise took part in Brussels as both bodies came together for the first time to prevent future attacks on government computers.

Finally, two cool things to finish on this week. Firstly we encourage all our followers to type “Do a Barrel Roll” in to Google and see what happens. Also, this week saw the launch of the new GTA 5 trailer, so we thought we would do you all a favour and share it with you here. Enjoy!

There were two reasons to celebrate recently as The Far Horizons received two prestigious awards for our work on their new tailor made website.

The Far Horizons offer adventure safari tours to East Africa and earlier this year Cyber-Duck produced a custom eCommerce website allowing customers to ‘tailor’ their own tour and view their safari itinerary using an interactive Google map.

The homepage of our latest award winning production.

We were ecstatic when we discovered we had won a prestigious Gold W3 Award in the category of Travel for The Far Horizons. The W3 Awards honours creative excellence on the web and also looks to recognise the creative professionals behind all their award winning entries. This year’s competition received over 3,000 entries, with only a handful of those entries being presented with the Gold award.

Cyber-Duck have won two silver W3 awards in previous years for our work on the Optima Optiman game back in 2008 and the Rosslyn Analytics website last year.

Later in the week we then received a certificate from the Web Marketing Association’s WebAward informing us that we had been presented the Travel Standard of Excellence award for our outstanding achievement in website development, also for our work on The Far Horizons’ website.

Siji showcases our newly framed WebAward for The Far Horizons.

The WebAward’s are handed out to websites based on their design, interactivity, technology, content, innovation, copywriting and ease of use. This is the first time Cyber-Duck have won a WebAward since 2007 when we were awarded the Real Estate Standard of Excellence for our work on the Greenstone website.

Cyber-Duck’s Production Director and project leader on The Far Horizons’ website, Matt Gibson was overjoyed with the double award win, stating; “It’s great to see such a creative project rewarded with these well-respected accolades. We believe we have produced a unique user experience for the East African safari tours market. We are continuing to enhance the marketing and UX (User Experience) on the website and hope to win more awards and generate more conversions for The Far Horizon.”

These awards have helped to produce one of the best years yet in Cyber-Duck’s history, and we still hope there are more awards to be won, before the turn of 2012.

In December of 2010, Cyber-Duck was approached to help create a completely new solution for The Knowledge Online; a market leading source of film and TV contacts and information.

Since originally launching as a printed book in 1986, The Knowledge has built up a reputation as an extremely well-respected source of information for people in the industry. However, in order to maintain their position as a market leader, Wilmington Publishing knew that it was necessary to modernise the website, placing emphasis on a unique and refreshed design, new features, usability and search engine friendliness.

The Knowledge can now boast a new and enhanced homepage interface.

The new website was built from the ground up, including integration with existing databases and an in-house CMS that enables Wilmington Publishing to easily add new content and edit pages/categories/sub-categories. It also features advanced predictive search functionality, and 5 different membership options.

Production Intelligence is a brand new subscription-based feature, which enables companies and individuals to gain access to a rich database of information about forthcoming productions. This includes access to relevant contact details of those involved in the production such as the line producer or production company.

Production Intelligence is the new subscription based service offered by The Knowledge.

Cyber-Duck provided the total digital solution for this project, including usability testing, design, development and integration of back-end systems and extensive testing. On a monthly retainer basis, Cyber-Duck will be working with TKO for website support, as well as building on the search engine optimisation of the website, and supporting other marketing activities.

Cyber-Duck’s Matt Gibson also gave his views on the launch:

Feel free to take a look at Cyber-Duck’s latest launch and let us know what you think of The Knowledge’s new website.

A few months ago you might remember we were visited by Ortis Deley from the Gadget Show; well if you want to catch our appearance on the show then tonight is the night.

Tonight’s edition of The Gadget Show will feature a comic based challenge, with Ortis Deley going up against Suzi Perry. We were chosen to work with Ortis on the show to help him realise his idea of an interactive Dracula-based comic.

Ortis Deley stars in Dracula – The Interactive Comic.

The resulting comic was conceived from some of the key chapters of the novel, and then personalised to feature Gadget Show presenter Ortis Deley in an innovative, interactive comic book format. Utilising photos of Ortis and turning him into the Dracula character, Cyber-Duck scripted out a summary of the section of the novel and included several interactive elements. The comic uses parallax scrolling to create a 3D effect along with interactive story paths, animation, audio and augmented reality to make for a really immersive, engaging and hopefully scary experience.

The Gadget Show presenter Ortis Deley has a quick snap with the duck’s after a long days filming.

So how did this come about? Well, it all began when Cyber-Duck Production & Marketing Director, Matt Gibson, was contacted by The Gadget Show about an interactive project named ‘Dead on Arrival’ Matt had created along with fellow interactive producer Geoff Gaviria. Their project had won them a prestigious British Interactive Media Association Award back in 2007. The Gadget Show production team discovered the web comic and were impressed. Upon discovering that Matt was now a director at Cyber-Duck they were keen to get us involved.

When it came to filming, Ortis paid our old offices in Borehamwood a visit along with the Gadget Show production crew and spent time shooting footage for the episode, including interviews with Matt as well as Jerome from the team who were the two main producers on the project.

The programme was first aired on Friday 23rd September, but if you missed it, you can still catch the episode on the Gadget Show website.

Visit the Interactive Dracula Comic here.

For those of you that don’t know, the first ever ‘Duckies Awards’ took place on Saturday evening at the new Cyber-Duck HQ in Elstree.

Each year, Cyber-Duck sponsors the UX Associate Prize at New Designers in the Business Design Centre, Islington. Each time the judging team were overwhelmed with the amount of outstanding new talent and we wished we could recognise more than one project a year – thus ‘The Duckies’ were born!

The event also recognised the 6th birthday of Cyber-Duck, as well as the big move into our own dedicated office building in Elstree.

It all went smoothly with almost all of the awarded graduates making the trip from all over the UK. Early in the day, preparations were made and the winners set up their projects to demonstrate to the rest of the attendees.

Projects on show included Acoustic Poetry from Michail Vanis, the Culturebook smartphone application from Calum Ryan, Will You Help Us? An interactive iPad picturebook from Alex Chapman, Fear on the Internet from Saturo Kusakabe and Colour Chameleon from Tom Picken and Pete Hall.

The X-Box Kinect was in constant use throughout the entire evening on the lower floor, alongside further graduate demonstrations. Projects on the lower floor included Tweeting Seat from Chris McNicholl and Kinect Robot from Darren Lewis. We also had some great music from DJ Steve Taylor and incredible close up magic from world-famous magician Nick Einhorn.

A lot of good networking was done, with attendees from a huge range of backgrounds in attendance. You can also view more photos from the evening on our very own Cyber-Duck Flickr Page.

This was our first ever event, and it certainly won’t be our last. All events we will be holding will be listed on our Meetup group, so if you are interested in being one of the first to know about the next one, simply join us there.

The Duckies Awards are less than 24 hours away and preparation is continuing as we prepare to welcome some of the UK’s brightest design graduates.

A whole variety of graduates and their award winning projects are making their way down to our new offices to showcase the projects which have earnt them a prestigious Duckies Award. Projects on show include Tweeting Seat, Kinect Robot, Fear on the Internet and Acoustic Poetry as well as apps which include ‘Colour Chameleon’, ‘Culturebook’ and ‘Will you help us?’.

If you want to find out more about these projects then come on down to the Cyber-Duck offices in Elstree from 5PM this Saturday 10th September and celebrate the Duckies Awards with us.

We have also been ‘pimping our office’ this week as we ordered in a new fridge, a new dishwasher and a massive 55 inch 3D TV and 40 inch HD TV for our two new meeting rooms in our brand new offices in Elstree. All of the ducks were very eager to have a glimpse of the new TV’s and a number of clients this week were also impressed with our latest purchase.

Arpit showcases Cyber-Duck’s new 3D TV.

We have also continued to kit our new offices with our very own branding which can be found throughout the offices. All week we had the painters in, painting the walls the famous Cyber-Duck Blue and Orange colours, and then we had the Cyber-Duck logos and services printed on to the walls using vinyl printing. The finished artwork has impressed all of the ducks.

The Cyber-Duck logo being printed on to the walls using vinyl printing.

We would also like to welcome a new member to the ever expanding work-force of Cyber-Duck. Paul O’Keefe joined the ducks this week as joined us as Junior Web & Motion Designer, and will work closely with our design team. All of the ducks would like to welcome Paul and help him settle in here.

Away from Cyber-Duck and HTC have sued Apple again this week using patents it had bought Google to lodge the complaint. HTC have claimed that Apple’s mobile devices and computers infringe patents involving wi-fi capability and processor communication technology. HTC have said the filed the lawsuit as they need to protect their “intellectual property, industry partners, and customers”

That’s it for this week; we look forward to seeing you this weekend and join us next week for lots of post Duckies reaction.