Danny and Matt were at UEL (University of East London) this week as they presented awards at the Creative Futures Ceremony.

Matt and Danny presented a variety of prizes to students of UEL for their work during the academic year, which included an Award for outstanding individual production by Jerome Defreitas with his Student Bursary project.

Matt and Danny presented to the award winners at the Creative Futures Event.

The project was rewarded for its wonderful design sense, and his first class efforts to go beyond the module brief. We are also pleased to announce that from next week Jerome will be working at the Cyber-Duck offices for a 3 month placement as a Design Intern. There was also an award for Stuart Norman and Matt Radbourne for their outstanding level three research and innovative production; Affected-Ed.

Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader at UEL, Dr Tony.D.Sampson was delighted with the awards ceremony, stating:

“It was wonderful to celebrate our Multimedia Design Technology and Interactive Media Design student successes, particularly with Danny and Matt from Cyber-Duck giving out the prizes. In addition to the thrill of prize-winning this was also an ideal opportunity for us to share our excitement regarding the new School of Arts and Digital Industries and collaborate with our industry friends on some exciting developments to our undergraduate provision.”

This week, Matt Gibson contributed to marketingmanagersInfo.co.uk with an article about how to create an SEO friendly website, and the best techniques for improving your websites search engine visibility. In the article Matt talks about the importance of unique website content and the best ways of helping search engines understand what your pages are about.

Matt shows you how to increase your websites search engine visability.

After last months hack attacks on the Playstation network, Sony have had even more bad news to address after hacker group LulzSec posted information it took from Sony Entertainment and Sony BMG on its site. The hackers said they broke into servers that run SonyPictures.com and took the email addresses and passwords of around 1 million users. This is even more bad news for what has been a chaotic time for Sony, and now the whole world will be looking to see how they react to the issue.

A researcher has decided to try and make Skype an open source platform by reverse engineering the protocol the service uses. The un-named hacker claimed he has already achieved the feat on his blog and provided the source code for versions 1.x/3.x/4.x of Skype as well as details of the rc4 layer arithmetic encoding the service uses. However it is now likely that Microsoft, who recently purchased Skype, will take legal action and have the blog post removed.

New rules governing the webs newest top level domains are expected to be finalised this month by ICANN. The new rules will mean that any company will be able to register an extension to replace their .com domain such as .hotel or .car. Industry experts believe this will provide a real competitive advantage for companies that adopt the scheme, who will also be able to register their brand names, such as .nike or .apple.

Although anyone who does adopt this scheme should not expect to see any domain change until the second half of 2012. What are your thoughts on www.cyber.duck?

Conferences, fun runs and the much anticipated launch of the iPad 2 all make the news this week.

Cyber-Duck have been featured on the 37signals product blog, explaining how the team utilises our project management system; Basecamp. The article explains how Basecamp has been a “lifesaver” in helping Cyber-Duck prioritise tasks and manage projects on a daily basis. The article also praises the range of features which help Cyber-Duck perform at a consistently high level.

Cyber-Duck featured on the 37signals product blog.

This week we have continued to prepare for our visit to the SXSWi conference in Austin, Texas. We have been planning the events and keynotes we want to attend as the much anticipated event is now under a week away!

Not all of the ducks sit at our desks and eat KFC, as Cyber-Duck sponsored employee Thomas Blanc competed in the Vertical Rush Shelter charity run which helps homeless people across the U.K. Thomas competed against professional athletes when he ran up all 42 flights (920 steps) of stairs in Tower 42, London (The second tallest building in London) in an impressive time of 5 mins 54 secs to come 20th overall in the race. Well Done Thomas!

Thomas Blanc sizes up his competition.

Matt was at UEL this week giving Multimedia & Games Design students a live brief for their project work. Matt will be playing the part of the client for all their projects in the latest example of Cyber-Duck’s commitment to helping develop young talent in the UK.

Cyber–Duck were in attendance at the Social PR 2011 event in London this week. The conference consisted of presentations, panel discussions and QA sessions on the convergence of Social PR and Marketing, Reputation management and how to identify influencers & create brand advocates.

The Polish contingent at Cyber-Duck helped the rest of the ducks to celebrate Tlusty Czwartek (or Fat Thursday) by bringing in piles of doughnuts to eat, which the team duly gobbled up in record time. Thanks Poland!

5 minutes into Fat Thursday.

The long awaited launch of the iPad 2 took place this week, with Apple chief executive Steve Jobs putting his health issues behind him to host the event. The second generation tablet boasts a faster processor, improved graphics, front and back cameras and a thinner design. It’s safe to say that all Ducks are eager to get one of these in the office and see what all the fuss is about.

Apple’s latest release is finally here!

Mozilla have developed a HTML5 demo site to showcase the latest features supported by Firefox 4. Demos to showcase these new features will be released every week until the final version of Firefox 4 is released.

That’s it for this week, we’re off out for drinks and a bit of a social with all the new ducks.

We’re sad to say that we are losing a member of the team today, but we’ve acted proactively by recruiting three more.

Cyber-Duck have won yet another new client in Pizza GoGo Ltd, a chain of pizza shops and wholesaler of pizza toppings. The ducks will be in charge of setting up an eCommerce website and connecting it to Sage for stock system and automatic synchronisation of orders.

We were happy to take advantage of the free food on offer when we attended this years’ UEL Creative Arts Alumni event. The featured work impressed the ducks which was designed by students and alumni of UEL’s visual and performing arts programmes.

Last week the much-anticipated HP Touchpad was unveiled officially by Hewlett-Packard at the HP WebOS event. The tablet device has really impressed Danny with features such as a dual-core, 1.2 GHz, Qualcomm Snapdragon APQ8060 processor, a 9.7” touch-screen display and an optional 16/32GB internal storage.

The New HP Touchpad was officially unveiled last week.

“The original Palm Pre offered the excellent ‘card’ based multi tasking. The first generation Palm Pre was let down by hardware performance and a slow pace of upgrades. Cyber-Duck is a Web OS accredited development firm and we are looking forward to producing some new web and native apps for these exciting new HP devices. ”

Danny’s thoughts on the new tablet.

Google Chrome has a new extension allowing users to block ’spammy’ results. The extension will tell Google the URL of the web page on which the blocked or unblocked search results are displayed and could affect Google search results in the future.

Even though Firefox 4 is still waiting to come out of beta, Mozilla’s UI team has still produced early mock-ups of what Firefox 5 could look like. Early signs show us that Mozilla is thinking about a site specific browser which will dedicate tabs to specific sites, and will integrate a navigation menu and site links within a site tab.

This picture is a mock-up of what Firefox 5 could look like.

An Android Malware named ADRD (aka Trojan:Android/Adrd.A) is affecting handheld devices for black-hat SEO purposes. The malware downloads a list of search URLs and then performs those searches at random in the background, which leads to excessive data charges. The Malware then fools the search engine in to thinking that the mobile user is using these keywords to copy search processes, creating searches in the search engine yielding the top results for those keywords and clicking on specific results.

Finally as earlier mentioned we are pleased to announce that in recent weeks Cyber-Duck have acquired three new members; Aswin Sundaram, John Hamelink and Gareth Drew have all been recruited to join our family of ducks.

With another week, comes another website launch. This time it was the EU and their new website; “The EU – What’s in it for me?”.

Cyber-Duck developed the website, which was designed to be a web based alternative to the “What’s In It For Me” brochure, and was aimed at keeping information more up-to-date and relevant. During the development, Cyber-Duck had the opportunity to implement our popular eye-tracking service, with a variety of participants taking part in several tasks testing the website.

The EU website fully launched with a great deal of press coverage.

Cyber-Duck attended the Press Conference for the launch, in which we tackled questions from journalists representing the BBC, New Media Age and Information World Review, all wanting to know about the website’s functionality and user experience. In the media, the website is creating quite a stir, being featured in national newspapers and the prominent Italian newspaper ‘Corriere Della Sera’.

Cyber-Duck were present at the University of East London, as former graduate and Cyber-Duck Production and Marketing Director Matt Gibson conducted a lecture on User Centred Design applied in the real world. Matt gave UEL students an insight in to Cyber-Duck’s User Centred Design process and demonstrated the benefits of getting users involved in the design process.

A slide from Matt Gibson’s User Centred Design lecture.

One of the first Apple personal computers, the Apple 1, was sold this week at a London auction for £133,250 ($210,000). The PC came in its original packaging, with a signed sales letter from Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs. The model was one of only 200 ever made, and originally sold for $666.66 when it was introduced in 1976.

One of only 200 Apple 1’s ever made when it was introduced in 1976.

Rupert Murdoch, head of the media giant News Corp has teamed up with Apple’s Steve Jobs to create a new digital “newspaper” called ‘the Daily’. The ‘iNewspaper’ is set to be the world’s first “newspaper” designed exclusively for tablet-style computers. The launch of the new iPad publication is expected early next year.

The show was a chance for all final year students from Interactive Media Design BA, Multimedia Design & Technology BSc and Computer Games Design BA to show off their final year projects which make up a bulk of their final marks along with their dissertations.

Matt gave a short speech about his time at UEL and what he gained from his experience there, along with how his career has panned out since! He then went on to give words of encouragement to a group of very promising young talent due to graduate from the university this year.

Matt was invited to the event by Tony Sampson (Senior lecturer and programme leader for new media degrees) to show the graduates some of the exciting and rewarding paths they have the opportunity to take in the new media industry.

After his words of encouragement, Matt presented awards to the 2 best final year projects which congratulate them on their innovation, presentation/delivery and research.
The stand-out projects to win awards were:

- Affect-ed by Matt Radbourne and Stuart Norman – The idea behind Affect-ed was to test emotionally designed prototypes and produce innovative (pervasive, ubicomp) software that can stimulate a more engaged learning experience related to ICTs. The project used infrared sensors to control interfaces on a larger scale than traditional computers, so a class for example could control the digital environment on their desks or even on the teachers whiteboard. The guys did their testing at local schools (they even got CRB approved) with their target users; school children. The project raises the question about how emotional design and affective usability can be employed to produce more engaging and effective education experiences when it comes to IT. More details here: http://bit.ly/bMsxuu

- Cloud Creative by Claudia Potton – another interface enabling people to engage in design experiences for learning. I.e. The space enables users to play, create art and share their creations. From creating visual poetry to abstract art based on physics anybody can be creative or trigger ideas / inspiration - http://bit.ly/dbPBjn