We would be delighted if you would join us for this threefold celebration as we mark our 6th birthday, the inauguration of our new office and the birth of ‘The Duckies’ UX Awards.

You can look forward to meeting business, design and technology folk and also see:

• Project showcases from ‘The Duckies’ UX winners
• Performance by world-class magician Nick Einhorn
• Free Eye Tracking demonstrations
• Music by DJ Steve Taylor
• Buffet and drinks

WHAT ARE THE DUCKIES?

For the last two years Cyber-Duck has sponsored 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!

HOW DO I REACH THE NEW OFFICE?

By Train

1. From London St. Pancras, board a train for Luton or Bedford (making sure it stops at Elstree and Borehamwood station) typically at platform 1 or platform B.
2. Alight at Elstree and Borehamwood station.
3. Board a Westbound number 107 or number 615 bus.
4. Alight in Elstree High Street.
5. Our new office is in Elstree House, opposite The Liberal Synagogue Elstree.

By Car

1. Join the A41..
2. Turn off toward Elstree (near junction 4 with the M1) onto Elstree Hill.
3. Our new office is in Elstree House, opposite The Liberal Synagogue Elstree.

• View directions in Google Maps

Some of the Ducks were attendees of the New Designers 2011 show in Islington this week, after Cyber-Duck sponsored the event.

Whilst they were there, members of the team including Danny awarded an associate prize to Rory Colsell from the University of Dundee who created a new business platform on our blog article about the event.

Sony has begun a ‘crackdown’ on the second hand games market by allocating some games with one use only codes to unlock online features. The passes will be allocated to certain fames only on a game-by-game basis, but some have criticized the move, saying it is contravening consumer rights.

Some of the team managed to get Google Plus accounts this week in the tiny windows the sign up process was open, so they duly invited everyone else in the office to ensure we are all up to date!

The UK police database has been called ‘hugely intrusive’ after the results of an investigation into breaches of the Data Protection Act were published. The report shows that over 900 officers and staff have breached the act over the last three years.

Facebook has integrated Skype as part of it’s response to the Google Plus launch. However, some have said it’s been rushed out, and it’s only compatible with Windows so far.

The huge news this week of course was the collapse of the News of the World. Twitter is said to have had a huge impact on the decision to shut the newspaper down, with staff from the paper being faced with abuse from angry members of the public and celebrities.

Cyber-Duck were sponsors and attendees of the renowned New Designers show in Islington, London yesterday.

The event showcases the best in UK post-graduate and graduate talent encompassing product design, interactive media and graphic design.The show is attended by leading business decision makers, the national press and international delegates who come to see the very best in British design.

As an award winning digital agency and leaders in the field of UX, Cyber-Duck were nominated to award the “New Designers Cyber-Duck Associate Prize”. The buzz and tension around the prize giving ceremony was outstanding and the Cyber-Duck team had a hard time choosing the winner. The team had to review the best in UX (User Experience) Design and Interaction Design for the web, tablet and mobile (including web apps, native apps and gaming projects).

After reviewing multiple projects and looking at the various universities The Cyber-Duck team decided to award the number 1 prize to the project ‘Play your part’ by Rory Colsell from the University of Dundee who created a new business platform (with a mobile app and print base instruction manual as deliverable at the show) which “endeavours to strengthen the connection between designers and their audience to support and enhance the design process”.

‘Play your part’ was the winning entry.

The conceptual platform would potentially enable any user to become an ‘ethnographic participant’ by completing tasks set by the creators of a product, service or application. The data submitted would be uploaded into an interface where the designers, producers or ethnographers could easily use this data to learn about their product or service. The Cyber-Duck team were impressed with the app produced by Rory and felt that this concept has the potential to revolutionise how designers conduct ethnographic research by bringing such a powerful concept to the design community.

Danny Bluestone, Managing Director of Cyber-Duck said: “Cyber-Duck were very impressed with the high level strategic thinking and commercial opportunities of ‘Play Your Part’. The end-to-end delivery of the concept and commercial potential are very high. All the students from the University of Dundee demonstrated an exceptionally high level of work”.

Other students from the Digital Interaction Design course at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design at the University of Dundee left a very strong impression on Cyber-Duck. Sam Grosset’s project Ambient Alerts which presented an amazing way to visualise motoring information to the driver. Marty Dunlop with his project ‘Clash’ – a concept that builds on locative apps; provoking users to interact with friends that are present at local hangouts defined by the user. Michail Vanis’s project ‘Acoustic Poetry’ was particularly strong. The idea is that deaf people would have an electronic object which allows them to explore soundscapes in everyday situations. When the deaf person feels curious about a particular situation they use the object to broadcast an audio sample to a remote human interpreter who composes a short, poetic message to describe the soundscape. The Cyber-Duck team were impressed with the fact that Michail coupled this strong concept with a fully functional prototype.

The Cyber-Duck New Designers team with the winner of the Cyber-Duck Associate Prize.

All of the work from the team is summarised in an iOS app produced especially for New Designers 2011. If you want to check it out, it’s available free from the iTunes Store.

Due to the magnitude and quality of the projects this year Cyber-Duck will invite our favourite exhibitors to present their projects and collect certificates and prizes at the Cyber-Duck summer party in Elstree. Follow Cyber-Duck on Twitter to be the first to know and be invited.

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Due to his relentless  levels of dedication, Matt won the Cyber-Duck World Cup fantasy football league. The rest of us felt the hour long victory dance around the office was a tad excessive though.

Some of the team dedicated their entire Saturday to research and development on location based applications, Gowalla and Foursquare. What troopers! Apparently they lost their notes in ‘The Worlds End’ pub though.

Clément has been looking at various augmented reality techniques, producing ‘magical’ teapots and globes on his screen at any given moment. We’re not sure how this is going to help anyone yet but it certainly is cool to watch.

The company vision poster now has pride of place in the office. Everyone at Cyber-Duck has signed the poster to signify that we all share the company vision and are united together to ensure that we reach our goal of becoming ‘The Leading Independent Digital Agency in 2011’.

Dan R Signing the Cyber-Duck Vision Poster

Remember that exciting new project from a few weeks ago? Well let’s just say it’s almost ready to be submitted to Apple for approval! As ever, we’ll keep you updated!

Our latest Communicator Award arrived to top up our collection for 2010. The award was presented to us for the BoonSpace project. If you haven’t already seen the site, you should check it out here.

The guys at Knight Group loved their new site Knight Precision Wire, so much that they have commissioned us for a second site in their group, ‘Omega Wire’. The team have started work on the design this week, so look out for it soon.

Finally, you should look out for the OfficeCavalry.com pre-registration site, which is due to be launched any moment!

Thanks for reading – there should be a lot more to talk about next week as usual…

Khal and Paolo tried some eye tracking glasses which can monitor what you are looking at wherever you are! That could be very dangerous!

Danny, Jerome and Matt have been at the ‘New Designers’ show, and have been really impressed with the level of talent there this year. Last night they presented the ‘Cyber-Duck Associate Prize’ to the best digital project at the show – SlopeScope. The guy behind it is Pablo de la Peña, a first class graduate from the University of Dundee. SlopeScope is ‘a conceptual service for snowboarders which allows passive recording from multiple angles on a slope’ and we absolutely loved the innovation and techniques behind it. Take a look at the SlopeScope website if you’re interested in finding out more about the project.

Some of the Cyber-Duck Team with Pablo, our prize winner at the New Designers Show

The team were equally impressed with Ross Forrest’s ‘Zoom’ project which demonstrated an enthusiasts social network and how a folksonomy based navigation system delivers a ‘journey’ based user experience. Calum Pringle’s ‘Subtle Subtitle’ project was fascinating. He clearly demonstrated (using an iphone prototype) how a mobile device can help people with speech impairments with the potential of transforming peoples lives.

Tom, Khal and Paolo have been ‘researching’ location-based mobile applications Gowalla and Foursquare with their incessant ‘checking in’ to places as exciting as Tesco and Greggs. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you should read this from Khal’s blog…we think it’s going to be the next big thing!

Some more great news…Chris and Sajith finished their masters degrees and have officially become the 2 cleverest people in the office! Well done to them (and thanks for the beer).

First of all we’ve launched 2 top class websites this week; Permits2Work and Knight Precision Wire. As ever, the team involved has put every effort in to make these some of the best looking, most functional sites you will find on the Internet today!

Danny and Khal have been out working on a very interesting usability testing and eyetracking project for a client at a lab in London.

The new Wisteria Formations YouTube channel has launched with 10 episodes on how to form a limited company in the UK. They’re in a brilliant stop motion illustrated format – definitely worth a look!

We’re giving away free VIP tickets to the New Designers show this week. The show is designed to showcase graduate talent from around the country and allow networking between them, potential employers and the media. We’ve only got limited numbers of tickets so you’ll need to be fast!

A cool tool we found this week is LaunchList. The idea of it is to provide a simple checklist for launching a new website – a really neat, simple and original solution to a problem.

We have also launched a brand new blog ‘Office Partitioning Expert’ sponsored by Optima Systems, which will provide expert news and information on the Office Partitioning industry.

To finish off we are proud to say that Chris Job is now a full time Web Developer at Cyber-Duck – officially joining the ducks! It’s great to welcome him into the team on a permanent basis, he’s brilliant at what he does and we’re excited about keeping him on board.

The New Designers event brings together over 3,500 graduates from the best design related courses across the country to the Business Design Centre in London. The purpose of the event is to allow these graduates to meet with potential employers and the media to exhibit their work.

New Designers is a great way to meet talented individuals whilst also offering a chance to network with top companies from around the U.K, and we want to invite you to come along to visit us. You need to be fast though, we only have 20 VIP tickets and we doubt they will be around for long!

Cyber-Duck’s clients can get free tickets.

EDIT: Event now over. Thanks to those of you who came along!