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!

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:

The big news coming out of Cyber-Duck this week is the launch of the new retirement planning website from RetireEasy.

The web application is the first and only comprehensive online tool that gives those in or nearing retirement peace of mind by empowering them to take control of their retirement lifestyle. The RetireEasy LifePlan service is an innovative and intuitive application which takes data including desired income in retirement, assets, investments, debts, loans and pensions, along with any other income and expenses and produces clears and user friendly charts and alerts.

Make sure you tune into Channel 5 tonight at 8pm as you should see the ducks make their TV debut. That’s right; the ducks are to take to the small screen this evening on the Gadget Show as part of this week’s Gadget Show challenge. Cyber-Duck were asked to produce an interactive Dracula comic as part of a challenge to bring 20th century literature up-to-date with presenter Ortis Deley. Make sure you watch it tonight or later in the week online, and let us know your thoughts. We’ll try and get a video of our appearance up next week!

Ortis Deley stars in Dracula – The Interactive Comic.

Three ducks are celebrating some landmark birthdays this week. Duo Tom Hicks and Harry Clark have now been working with the Cyber-Duck marketing department for 2 years and 1 year respectively. The third duck, Cyber-Duck’s Development Director, Sylvain Reiter is celebrating a remarkable 5 years at the company this week; here’s to another 5!

Sylvain, Tom and Harry celebrate “together”.

Tom, Siji and Harry went into the big city to attend a Meetup on ‘Social Proof and the Zero Moment of Truth’. The event featured Nick Garner, Head of Search at Unibet who spoke about the importance of engaging users during the ‘Zero Moment of Truth’ and Mike Essex and Samantha Stratton from Koozai who spoke about how to create positive brand search results and the best practices to prevent cyber-squatters from tarnishing your brand with negative search engine terms.

Danny, John and Tomasz have become the latest Ducks to become certified ScrumMasters after successfully completing the course run by the Scrum Alliance last weekend. The guys attended two days’ worth of lectures and tutorials on all things Scrum and Agile before taking and passing an online exam. They now join the long list of certified ScrumMasters from Cyber-Duck including Matt, Gareth, Sylvain and Lee.

From Left; John, Tomasz, Dave Hicks (ScrumMaster Teacher) and Danny during the weekend course.

After finishing its Beta ‘invite only’ phase, Google’s new social media platform; Google+, has officially been launched this week to the entire web. The platform has earnt praise for features which include multi person “hangout” chats, sharing computer screen content with friends, the integration of search within Google+ and a friends “Circle” list. Reports have suggested that interactivity with the website is slowing, but it remains to be seen whether Google can finally become a force to reckoned with in the social networking market.

Facebook have been very quick to respond to the Google+ launch as they announced their new music initiative this week. Facebook have partnered with a host of music companies including Spotify, SoundCloud and Vevo enabling users to stream music via an open graph Spotify app. Facebook also launched a host of interface changes and updates this week much to the contempt of many users, with comic artist ‘The Oatmeal’ satirising the trend brilliantly.

That’s not all Google launched this week as they also announced Google Wallet, a mobile payment system. The new app has been released in partnership with Citi-Bank and MasterCard and works with thousands of PayPass merchants. The new payment system essentially scans your phone using NFC (Near Field Communication) technology, enabling you to make a quick and hassle free purchase. It only works with a small number of phones at the moment and only in the US, but we are excited to see NFC starting to take off.

Google Software Engineers showcase the new Google Wallet and its benefits.

Currently the wallet holds offers, loyalty cards and credit cards with plans to introduce transit cards, boarding passes and tickets in the future.

Bad news for Microsoft this week as they announced their dedicated search engine Bing, has cost the company $5.5 billion since its launch in June 2009. Bing has been trying to compete in a market dominated by Google, however they claim they are not trying to “out- Google” but just change the way search is used.

Finally we are pleased to announce we have two new ducks on board this week. Gil Ben Horin is now working with us as our new Strategy Director and Ben Speakman joined us as a Junior Web Developer. We would like to offer them both a warm welcome to Elstree House!

The Cyber-Duck Duckies Awards was hosted for the first time last weekend and it was a resounding success, with many in attendance.

Clients, staff, graduates and UX design enthusiasts where in attendance at the awards ceremony as we packed out our new dedicated Elstree offices. There was a wide variety of graduate projects on display as well as tricks from world class magician Nick Einhorn and live music from DJ Steve Taylor. The Cyber-Duck team were also offering free eye-tracking demonstrations using our very own in-house Tobii eye-tracker.

Overall the Ducks have been thrilled with the outcome of the event, and we were also recognised with an article in the Borehamwood and Elstree Times for efforts and dedication to nurturing the best design graduates from across the UK.

The Cyber-Duck team were also out and about networking this week as we attended three separate events.

On Monday, Danny was invited by the University of Portsmouth to attend the Business School’s MBA presentation. Danny has been mentoring a group of students from Saudi Arabia and India for the last 3 months on their market research initiative project for an exciting UK SaaS (Software as a service). Danny ranked their presentation and appendixes and congratulated the MBA team for their hard work.

Danny, Siji, Neil and Ya Sheng were also in attendance at the Middlesex University’s final show of MA Design for Interactive Media. The Dim Sum event features a wide variety of graduates projects with most making use of iPods, iPads, Arduino and in particular the Xbox Kinect in order to explore the visual, acoustic, and haptic interplay between people and machines.

This was an especially important to Danny Bluestone and Ya Sheng Chang as they are both alumni of the Design for Interactive Media (DIM) degree which is now moving from Cat Hill campus to the Hendon campus of Middlesex University. The course name which is a worldwide leader in teaching interaction design, information architecture, digital design and creative technologies will also change its name MA Creative Technology.

Danny and Ya Sheng congratulated Gordon Davis, Stephen Boyd Davies and Magnus Moar for the efforts and their immense contribution to each of their careers. Also in attendance were Neil Noakes of We are Float (a London based Digital Agency), Sushma Madan, James Shorrocks, Felipe Urquijo Molina, Adriana De Pesters, William Ho and Lee Woodward, Client Services Director at Sapient Nitro (who sponsored the beers and drinks). Also in attendance was Jon Cox, the DIM technician who continues to support all the students and equipment at the DIM course.

John and Karolina boarded “The London Rose” as they attended Annual London Web Boat Cruise. The event was attended by over 130 leading web companies, start-ups and entrepreneurs, and it also gave John and Karolina some time to see the sights of London from in top of the River Thames.

VMware have this week launched a new version of its popular visualisation software for the Mac. The Fusion 4 software boasts over a 100 new features which include a “Mac Like” experience, providing the best windows experience on the OS X Lion and better performance and faster graphics enabling the Mac to deliver 3D graphics 2.5 times faster than previous versions of the software.

Political figures from all three of the UK’s major parties have reportedly all signed up to the new social media website Google+. Prime Minister David Cameron, along with Labour leader Ed Milliband and Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg have all created profiles on the website. David Cameron said he joined Google+ as he is an advocate of anything that makes politics “more open and accessible”.

There was an interesting article on the BBC website this week which went in to detail as to whether Facebook is starting to lose its identity. The article comes after some recently released features from the social networking platform, which appear to replicate features from two of their biggest rivals in Google+ and Twitter. The article suggests that Facebook are no longer the innovators of the social media industry and they are feeling the pressure of their competitors and the negative publicity regarding privacy.

Microsoft engineers have announced this week that their new web browser for Windows 8 will not support plug-ins. Users will still be able to access traditional web browsers for websites that rely on plug ins, but this means the new interface will not support Adobe Flash, as Microsoft look to phase out the use of Flash video and replace it with HTML5. Google, Apple, Mozilla, and Opera are also backing the use of HTML5 which may well see the end of flash.

This week marks our first working week in Elstree House and so far we’re thrilled with the new office.

After a lot of hard work and support from members of the Cyber-Duck team, last weekend we were able to move all our equipment into our new dedicated offices in Elstree. Many of the Ducks spent last Saturday lending a helping hand, and throughout the week we have all been doing our bit to help get settled in.

The Ducks make a toast to our new Elstree House Offices.

As mentioned last week, Cyber-Duck will now benefit from a dedicated IT and comms room, free staff and client parking, new VOIP/ISDN telecoms infrastructure, dedicated eye tracking lab, a chill-out lounge, eating area, two board rooms and more space to accommodate for the ever expanding workforce. Our new office is also set to host the ‘Duckies Awards’ 2011 which takes place on the 10th September from 5pm.

Take a quick tour around our new Elstree House Studio.

We are also proud to announce the launch of the new Wisteria Business Plans website this week. The new service produces bespoke business plans for start-ups and companies seeking funding or investment from venture capitalists. The website provides a variety of business plan packages, enabling the user to select the package to meet their needs.

The new Wisteria Business Plans website is finally launched.

We are also happy to announce that Cyber-Duck have been commissioned to develop a brand new web application for Maiden International. The application will feature a dynamic presentation of added value to auto insurance products, presented in a way which is both engaging and user friendly. The web application will be optimised for laptops and will also be compatible with iPad tablet devices.

Big news coming out of Apple this week as their charismatic CEO Steve Jobs has resigned and been replaced by Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook. Mr Jobs has had a tough year having had a major battle with cancer, which has seen him on medical leave for most of 2011. Since the announcement it has been reported that shares in Apple have fallen by 2.5%.

There’s also bad news for Google this week as they have agreed to pay $500 million in fines for publishing adverts which sold illegal drugs to US customers, via their Google Adwords platform. Advertisements had been appearing on Google.com from Canadian pharmacies which sold illegal medicines to US citizens from a valid prescription. It has been stated that the size of the fine is relative to the profits Google made from these advertisements.

HP stand to lose millions of pounds as they dramatically cut the price of their new HP Touchpad, going from £350 to £89 on the low end 16 GB model and £450 to £115 on the 32 GB version. The discontinuation of the tablet and WebOS (the operating system behind it) comes just 48 days after it originally went on sale, making it the shortest and most expensive product launch in history. Retailers such as Dixons, PC World and Currys had to deal with a massive surge of traffic as many users looked to take advantage of these cut price deals.

Luckily, Matt and Gareth managed to get their hands on their very own HP Touchpads, but unfortunately much to the anguish of John, all the Touchpads had sold out by the time he tried to buy one.