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.

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.

In a classic case of ‘practising what they preach’, Google took the decision to manually drop the Chrome product in Google search results pages. The error occurred when an external agency was commissioned to promote a video about Chrome, who in turn paid for various bloggers to post the video.

Some instances of the video being posted also had some text below, which mentioned that the blog post was sponsored by Google Chrome, and in one instance of this, the text was found to have a link to the Chrome product within it. This practise of paying someone to link back to you is against Google’s guidelines.

Matt Cutts, of Google’s webspam team, explained that google.com/chrome would be demoted for at least 60 days. After this point, someone from the Chrome team would be able to submit a reconsideration request.

Whether this is a clever PR stunt, or a genuine reaction, this is a very smart move from the search giant. Not only are they getting promotion for their Chrome browser on some of the world’s top media outlets, they are also hammering the point across to website teams across the world: paying for links is bad!

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.

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!

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!

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.