This week saw more twists and turns in the SOPA debate as the new Cyber-Duck website draws ever closer.

Exciting news as the launch of the new Cyber-Duck website, as well as the tablet and mobile friendly versions are all set to be released over the next few weeks. The ducks have been working hard to ensure everything is primed and ready, and we look forward to introducing our new web presence to you in February.

Features of the new website include a brand new, clean design, detailed case studies, live chat facility and completely overhauled careers section. The new website will also make a bigger feature of the blog and weekly, and will be built with a fully customised CMS, so the team will be able to easily edit and update the website when necessary.

Last weekend also saw the ‘end’ of the SOPA and PIPA bills, after a massive backlash from the digital industry and other influential companies. Last weekend Wikipedia blacked out their website for 24 hours in protest of the bill; this and other high profile demonstrations look to have been rewarded. The campaign against these bills gathered support from the likes of Facebook, Google and eBay who all made their feelings clear that they thought the laws would hinder the Internet’s development.

Google have transformed their Privacy Policy this week with an update that allows users to access Google products under a single agreement. Google recognised that they have a wide variety of products, each with its own rules and regulations. With the change, users will be able to access all Google products by signing up to one policy, which Google thinks will create a “simpler, more intuitive Google experience”.

Google map out their new user policy.

The changes could also lead to criticism of the company, as they have already recognised that users may be disgruntled when they see their Google documents showing up in Gmail or contact details from one area of their lives popping up in another.

Finally, the ducks gathered on Thursday to celebrate the birthday of HR manager Karolina Pajewska. We also want to wish Cyber-Duck’s UX designer Neil Dawson a belated happy birthday as he celebrated his birthday last week while he was off skiing in Austria.

Neil’s modelling career is soon to kick off.

That’s it for this week, see you all next week for yet another Cyber-Duck weekly.

Welcome back to another edition of the Cyber-Duck weekly, where you can also access the latest Cyber-Duck Podcast.

To establish a new business strategy for the next 3 years the management decided to instigate a Blue Ocean approach by involving all the 27 team members to understand what they want to eliminate, reduce, raise and create within the business. The model of Blue Ocean was conceived by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne of The Blue Ocean Strategy Institute at INSEAD, France. The team at Cyber-Duck have been involved in various workshops with presentations being made today.

Harry presents during the Cyber-Duck Blue Ocean.

Episode 2 of our podcast (named the Pondcast) is available now on iTunes. This time you will be treated to Tom, Ben and Neil discussing some of their new year’s tech resolutions.

If you tried accessing Wikipedia on Wednesday you would been met with the following screen:

Wikipedia Website during the 24 Hour Blackout.

Wikipedia blocked all website content for 24 hours as part of an Internet-wide protest against two proposed acts in the United States; the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). The acts have been proposed in part to tackle the problem of foreign-based websites that sell pirated content, however many disagree including Google, eBay and Facebook.

Wikipedia’s protests has led to 8 US lawmakers withdrawing their support for the bid and the news was also welcomed by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Mr Zuckerberg sent his first tweets for 3 years, stating ”Tell your congressmen you want them to be pro-internet”

Mr Zuckerberg then went on to claim “We can’t let poorly thought out laws get in the way of the internet’s development. Facebook opposes Sopa and Pipa, and we will continue to oppose any laws that will hurt the internet.”

This was Mark Zuckerbergs first tweet in 3 years.

Away from the SOPA debate, Google have yet again made changes to search with an upgrade which allows users to start social conversations directly from their search feeds. The change is designed to enhance search by making it easier for Google+ users to start social conversations.

Finally, England’s favourite Football star (and America’s favourite Soccer player) David Beckham was involved in his first Google+ hangout. The interview was conducted at Google HQ in Silicon Valley, with Mr Beckham answering questions from London, Madrid and even Ghana.

That’s it for another week; make sure you come back next week as we provide you with more news from the ever changing digital world.

The Ducks helped to produce a new video for London Cardiovascular Clinic and twitter’s war with Google continues.

Filming began today for the introduction video which will be used on the new London Cardiovascular Clinic website. Cyber-Duck’s UX Producer Ya Sheng was present during the filming which was co-produced by Adam Morley, Cyber-Duck’s dedicated videographer. The London Cardiovascular Clinic website is one of Cyber-Duck’s latest creations and the video can be seen when website is officially launched.

A couple of snaps from the shoot.

Twitter has announced that they intend to battle Google over their “Search Plus Your World” update. The new changes integrate social search into their regular search results, and Twitter feel that their real-time information is often the most relevant result for users. Twitter have stated that Google’s changes will make it much harder to find such information, as they look to blend public Google+ pages into regular search results.

The current ICT programme which is taught in all schools across the UK has been described as a “mess” by the current Education Secretary, Michael Gove. Mr Gove also announced that the ICT curriculum will be replaced by a flexible curriculum in computer science and programming, designed with the help of universities and industry.

It has long been claimed that the UK is too far behind the likes of America, Japan and Europe when it comes to computer science with Google’s Eric Schmidt claiming in August that education in Britain is holding back the country’s chances of success in the digital media economy. It is hoped the reform will enable today’s youth “to work at the forefront of technological change”.

This also follows on from the news last week that the Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, has vowed to take an online computer coding course.

In other news, Google has persuaded one of Spain’s largest banks ‘BBVA’ to switch all 110,000 of their staff members to use Google’s Cloud service. The deal is the biggest Google has signed with one individual company for its cloud computing services. Some concerns have been raised about security of customers banking details; however the deal is seen as a breakthrough in corporate adoption.

Microsoft and LG Electronics have announced a patent licensing agreement which covers tablets, smartphones and other mobile devices running Google’s Android or Chrome operating system. This is the 11th deal Microsoft has made with a device manufacturer with others including HTC, Samsung and Acer. The news means “more than 70 per cent of all Android smartphones in the US are now receiving coverage under Microsoft’s patent portfolio”.

There has been a strong reaction by Reddit this week to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) bills, which aim to crack down on internet piracy. Reddit, a popular news sharing website is planning to protest by shutting down normal operations on 18th January for 12 hours and they are hoping they will receive backing from the likes of Google, Facebook and Wikipedia. You can find out more about the SOPA act by watching the video below.

Last month, US hosting firm GoDaddy had come out in support of the the SOPA anti-piracy law, however they had to discontinue their support as angry customers threatened to transfer sites and domains away. Despite the U-Turn, many customers continued with the changeover.

Cyber-Duck kick off 2012 with the launch of a new KFTV website and the announcement of a new project with Optima Systems.

KFTV.com, our latest project for Wilmington Publishing & Information Ltd, part of Wilmington Group Plc, launched this week. Much like The Knowledge Online, which we also designed and built this year, KFTV is in the business of helping people find the best film, TV and commercial production companies and information out there. The main difference with KFTV is that it is an international directory. If you want to check it out, it’s live now.

Cyber-Duck showcases the new KFTV Website.

Cyber-Duck are delighted to announce we will be redesigning and redeveloping a brand new web presence for long standing client Optima Group. Optima are leaders in the glass and drywall partitioning market and as such they looked to Cyber-Duck to produce a website that reflects and reinforces their position as market leaders.

Cyber-Duck built and launched Optima’s current website in May 2008 and has since enjoyed a close relationship with Optima delivering many different mini-projects including games, micro-sites and award winning apps.

Now the ducks are tasked with creating a new innovative and captivating interface for Optima, drawing on our vast range of experience in design and user experience. The website is due to be launched later in 2012.

The world’s most popular search engine; Google, has been punished by none other than themselves for unethical SEO practices. The search giant was found to have cheated through the use of sponsored links; a practice they actively discourage. As a result Google have dropped their own chrome web browser for at least 60 days in the search engine rankings.

Microsoft have celebrated the demise of their unpopular web browser IE6 by baking a cake. The celebrations come as Microsoft were happy to reveal that the web browser is now used by less than 1% of US internet surfers. There have been many campaigns from Microsoft to discourage users from using IE6 and persuade them to start using later editions such as IE8 and IE9.

Microsoft celebrate the demise of IE6.

That’s it for our first 2012 edition of the Cyber-Duck weekly. There’s a lot lined up for 2012 including the new Cyber-Duck website, new Cyber-Duck iPad and mobile app, build up and reaction to our trip to SxSW as well as plenty of new client websites which are due to be launched throughout the year, so watch this space to stay up to date with all the latest.

Cyber-Duck’s very own Harry Clark was one of 5 speakers at this week’s Figaro seminar on SEO. Harry spoke alongside client Edward Canavan from Wilmington Publishing & Information Ltd, part of Wilmington Group Plc about how we built ‘The Knowledge Online’ website with SEO in mind from the outset, as well as the results we achieved in doing this.

iTunes Match has at last been launched in a number of countries internationally, including the UK. The cloud-based music service allows owners of compatible Apple products to stream music stored on their computer to another Apple device wherever they are, provided they have a data connection.

If you haven’t caught our summary of 2011 infographic yet, there’s still time to check it out. We’d like to thank everyone who has given us positive feedback about it; we hope to do lots more like it in the future.

Google has announced its annual search Zeitgeist for 2011. Amongst the most surprising popular search queries is ‘What is scampi’, with Rebecca Black topping the most-searched-for list.

Two of our directors have birthdays at this time of year, with Matt celebrating this week and Sylvain next. The whole team would like to wish them a Happy Birthday.

A couple of members of the Cyber-Duck team have been noticing Facebook’s famous Timeline update rolling out to various friends. The new layout for the profile page allows users to look back in time across their Facebook lives and see things like status updates and photos posted over the years.

Microsoft has announced that XP users are going to be automatically upgraded to Internet Explorer 8; with other Windows users to get the latest version. This could be the beginning of the end for cross-browser compatibility issues all over the country.

A more intelligent version of Google Android’s voice actions feature with natural speech recognition, called Majel, is said to be in development for release in early 2012. Experts have said this update will be released in direct response to Apple’s Siri for iOS.

The Cyber-Duck Christmas holiday dates are from 22nd December to 2nd of January; any client emergencies can be dealt with through calling the mobile of the relevant team member. Aside from this, all that’s left to say is that we wish you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! We look forward to working with you in 2012.

London based Meetup ‘The Digital Pond’ took place on Tuesday, and the team started preparing for Christmas with secret santa.

Cyber-Duck’s first London based Meetup ‘The Digital Pond’ took place this week. The Node.js Showcase was aimed towards the development community, but encouraged anyone in the digital industry to attend. The evening featured guest speakers who spoke in depth about how they have used Node.js in their projects, as well as providing real life demonstrations.

Cyber-Duck would like to thank all speakers and sponsors of the event which included Couchbase, Clock and Byng Systems.

The Meetup was also the perfect opportunity for us to launch and showcase our latest DuckLab project; Cyber-Duck’s very own Coffee Lottery. The web application is designed to put the fun into coffee making at home or in the office. Users sign into the website using Twitter, before being invited to start a round of Coffee Lottery; participants then have 5 minutes to enter their order before Coffee Lottery randomly selects someone to make the whole lot!

We launched our Cyber-Duck Christmas infographic on Wednesday. The infographic included information on all the ducks as well as our coffee count, countries we have visited and the number of projects we have worked on throughout 2011. Take a look for yourself and share with your friends!

Cyber-Duck are also pleased to welcome on board a new client in Titanium Fire. Titanium Fire specialise in managing advanced SalesForce.com implementation for large corporations around the world, and Cyber-Duck are now tasked with building a new, innovative website for their Sales Force consultancy service as well as integration with Orchestra CMS running off Sales Force.

The ducks got into the seasonal spirit with their secret Santa gifts too this week. A pick of our favourite gifts included Gareth’s Nerf Gun, John’s baby food and Tom’s self-adhesive hooks. Thanks Santa!

The Ducks wait patiently for their Christmas gifts.

We had a number of birthdays to celebrate as 3 ducks turned a year older. The ducks had cake and gifts for Ya Sheng, Paul and Raj to celebrate and we will all be going out tonight to continue the celebrations. Once again we would like to wish them all a happy birthday!

Neil and Ya Sheng got back from from the Mobile User Experience Conference (MEX) in London at the end of last week and we’ve since had some of the knowledge imparted upon us. MEX is a 2 day event where 100 of the brightest minds in mobile, media & design come together to learn, network and create a collective response to the MEX Pathways.

Ya Sheng and Neil from Cyber-Duck join in on a debate at MEX.

The designer duo were able to attend the event for free as part of the MEX scholarship programme. The scholarship was sponsored by the kind guys at the ICT Knowledge Transfer Network (ICTKTN).

Twitter has unveiled a completely new redesign. The popular micro-blogging site has released a simplified version of their web interface for both desktop PC’s and mobile apps. New features include an improved Twitter timeline and users’ profiles, as well as a new discovery tool, which replaces the @Mentions section, and an easy-access “tweet” button.

Finally we would like to welcome Ramon Lapenta, the latest front end developer to join our talented bunch. Welcome on board Ramon!

As we enter the final calendar month of the year, Cyber-Duck HQ is busier than ever with Christmas parties and awards dinners.

Last night all the Duck’s gathered together at Giuseppe’s place in London Bridge to celebrate the annual Cyber-Duck Christmas party. The night involved lots of great food, wine, laughs and banter as all Cyber-Duck team members, their partners and associates celebrated another great Christmas and another great year in the world of Cyber-Duck.

Cyber-Duck were in attendance to witness long standing client Optima win a 2011 Construction Marketing Award in the category of ‘Best Use of Technical Information’ for the Optima iPad app which was created by the talented team of designers and developers from Cyber-Duck. Danny and Harry joined Christian Mabey and Laura Jameson from Optima as both teams were presented with the award.

This is the third time Cyber-Duck have helped a client swoop a prestigious CMA award, winning with Optima in 2008 and OAG in 2010 for ‘Best Use of a website’, as well as this year’s award again for Optima.

Cyber-Duck and Optima scoop a 2011 Construction Marketing Award.

The office was also excited to find out which smartphone they would receive today as Cyber-Duck bought 10 new handsets for the team. The Ducks ordered 6 Samsung Galaxy Nexus primes, 2 HTC Sensations and 2 Nokia Lumia’s which will be distributed among the office.

Arpit models our the new Cyber-Duck phones.

The phones have been bought as a reward for the hard work of the Cyber-Duck team, as well as enabling our developers to test newly built apps on a range of the latest mobile software available. Safe to say there is a lot of competition among the Duck’s to see who gets the latest Samsung handset.

The Ducks went down to our new photo studio for their professional work photos (along with a couple of cheeky snaps) which will all be used on the new Cyber-Duck website when it is launched. Below is a select few of our favourite pictures.

A couple of our favourite snaps.

Our 2nd ever meetup, the node.js showcase, is gathering real pace as developers from all over London continue to confirm their attendance for the event. The ducks have managed to max out capacity for the event with more developers on the waiting list. The event will feature a massive 7 guest speakers including Cyber-Duck’s own John Hamelink and Gareth drew alongside Kornel Lesinski, Marek Majkowski, Jonah Fox, Rob Tweed and Mike Cronnelly.

We would also like to thanks Byng Systems, Couchbase and Clock who are the official sponsors of the node.js showcase.

The start of December means the end of Movember. The ducks raised a grand total of £264 which will all go towards The Prostate Cancer Charity, The Institute of cancer research and the Movember Foundation. Below is a picture of all the ducks on the last day of Movember.

All the ducks with their mo’s.

Finally, a new tiny printer has been created which looks to bridge the gap between your smartphone and your morning paper. The Little Printer collates news puzzles and gossip from your friends using your smartphone to set up subscriptions and print receipt sized newspapers for you to read. Pre-orders for the tiny printer can be taken from 2012.

That’s all in a busy week for Duck’s. Come back next week for more of the latest Ducky News.

In production this week is our yearly digital Christmas card. We are taking a different approach with a summary of 2011 at Cyber-Duck in the form of an interactive infographic! We will be sure to show this off when it’s ready, so look out for it here.

The first ever full round of ‘Coffee Lottery’ was played today. The lucky (or unlucky) tea maid was randomly selected to be @tmhcks, using our brilliant new app from the DuckLab, developed by @mattduck84, @frogstew and @john_hamelink.

A loyalty study on smartphones from research company GfK showed that iPhone users are indeed the most loyal to their device. 84% of iPhone users answered that they intended to pick iPhone again when they replace their handset. This compares to 60% of Android users and just 48% of Blackberry owners.

Stanford University has announced that it is setting up undergraduate level computer science courses on YouTube. Budding future Stanford graduates will be able to watch tutorial videos and complete assignments over the web. Courses available include Computer Science 101, Software as a Service, Human-Computer Interaction, Natural Language Processing, Game Theory, Probabilistic Graphical Models, Cryptography and Design and Analysis of Algorithms.

The ‘Stop Online Piracy Act’, the proposed US government act designed to get rid of allegedly copyright infringing websites from the Internet, has hit some opposition this week. Facebook, Twitter, Google and Zynga have been amongst the big players to join the growing list of opponents to the bill.

We’ve all seen films that envision a future where robots heavily feature in our daily lives, but it seems a real use for our metallic friends has already been uncovered. Prisons in South Korea have started using robotic assistants to patrol corridors, monitoring conditions and alerting guards to any violent behaviour before hit gets out of hand.

Nokia Siemens networks, a network equipment joint venture between the two companies has announced it is to cut 17,000 jobs in an attempt to “…maintain long term competitiveness and improve profitability in a challenging telecommunications market.”

Finally, we thought we’d leave you with our favourite Google Doodle in a while, this time celebrating the 60th anniversary of the first book by polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem. The Doodle, which was featured on Wednesday, expanded into an elaborate interactive animation.

We set up our very own photography studio in our (surprisingly spacious) basement earlier in the week. The studio will allow us to take professional photos not just of the ducks for the upcoming new Cyber-Duck website, but also for clients. This will be a huge advantage to using external studios as the only travel and organisation we need to do is go down the stairs!

@Siji_Banjo and @IngaGracz took to the water on Thursday with a trip on the HMS President for the latest Online Marketing Network meetup event. There were some big name speakers showing how various online marketing disciplines could be applied using real life examples. @ChelseaBlacker spoke about the effects of tv advertising on search traffic, @mrjamescarson from Bauer Media gave a highly entertaining talk on the use of video content to achieve online goals, whilst @rich_kirk of Performics London gave a ‘both sides of the coin’ view on the use of social media links in improving seo rankings. In addition @bloomtrigger, a new online charity aiming to save the rainforest and @RichardShove, an SEO specialist also spoke. It was a great evening and even without the free bar it was a very worthwhile event.

The first ‘Pondcast’ was released to the world, and is now available to download on iTunes. In this edition you will hear some interesting opinions from Gil, John and Arpit on Flash, Firefox and Google+ Pages.

PayPal launched SendMoney, A Facebook app for sending money along with an ecard. This is a big step in the world of social payments and is said to open the path for useful applications that allow friends to easily reimburse one another for anything from lottery pools to lunch.

Associated Press has criticized some of it’s journalists for breaking news on Twitter rather than through traditional wires. According to AP, announcing news on Twitter first can cause confusion and false news to be propagated.

Google launched its Music Store in an attempt to go head to head with rival Apple and their music store, iTunes. The service is giving one free play of each track to those using the service, and analysts say the foray into music will continue to strengthen the organisation’s position in the mobile market.

An OPERA experiment at CERN has confirmed previous studies which recorded particles travelling at speeds faster than light.

Last of all this week we would like to wish Sangheethan a very happy birthday for earlier in the week; hope you had a great one Sanghee!

It’s going to be a laid back affair (with free beer and pizza) – feel free to pop along to our meetup page to sign up – you don’t have to be a Node.js whizz to come, and it won’t cost you a thing!

We thought it was high time we gave a ‘tache update’ after 11 days of our ‘Movember’ challenge for the Prostate Cancer charity. If you want to contribute to a great cause then you can visit our Movember page and donate to our group.

It’s also worth a mention that we’re working with a really interesting new project in the form of RiteSim. The company will offer the chance for business travellers, holiday makers and students to purchase and top up pay as you go sim cards from various countries online. Cyber-Duck will be working with the company to produce a fully customised Magento-based e-commerce website, featuring a back-end with stock management, bespoke reports and accounting.

We’re making some great progression on our podcast ‘The Pondcast’, with some more trial runs completed and edited, we’re ready for the big time. We’ll be expecting to see our names in lights pretty soon, but don’t worry we won’t forget about our loyal weekly readers. Look out for the first public episode next week.

We launched our latest mobile app this week, a glass thickness calculator for Optima. It’s an indispensable accessory for architects and surveyors and allows them to calculate correct glass thickness by entering load and height figures. You can download it from the app store now.

Pizza Friday came with a twist this week with 18” (yes, 18) pizzas coming from our friends at Costco. For most, one slice was enough, others didn’t end it there.

Slightly shocking news came earlier this week with the news that our old friends Adobe will no longer be creating new versions of Flash for mobile. Could this be the beginning of the end for Flash on the web too? Perhaps it’s too early to speculate but it’s certainly interesting for the future of the mobile industry.

It was announced from Steam earlier in the week that there has been a security breach in their forums, leading to credit card information of their users. The details were encrypted but it has been advised that users should change their password and monitor credit card activity as a precaution.

Google has launched the next phase in its social plan with the inception of Google+ pages. The pages are much like those on Facebook and are aimed squarely at businesses. Interestingly though, the company has pointed out in the terms and conditions of the service that they will not be allowing promotions or competitions. Speculation suggests that the company is looking to avoid possible legal trouble in the future, but could this limit the marketing potential of the service?

An official from Google was also quoted as saying this week that Google+ is not designed to directly compete with Facebook. According to Nikesh Arora, the company’s Chief Business Officer, “it is a platform which allows us to bring social elements into all the services and products that we offer.”

You might remember from last week’s update that several members of the team were going off to #MozFest over the weekend; well they came back full of stories and knowledge from the big Mozilla event in London. One big talking point was Popcorn.js, a javascript library built for “anyone who wants to create time-based interactive media on the web”. Other notable points of interest include the open source web badge project ‘Open Badges’ from Mozilla and technological developments in web based journalism.

During the event, some of the Cyber-Duck team spent time working on our latest Node.js DuckLab project, ‘CoffeeLottery’ – more about this soon. Gareth and John also went to a talk from creator of HTML5 Canvas, Node.js game ‘Rawkets’, Rob Hawkes on how to easily make a single player game into multi-player, featuring some live coding from the Mozilla Technical Evangelist. Here’s a video from the event: