Insights

Yesterday, budding programmer Luke Ashford (13) from Team Elstree and Cyber-Duck Managing Director, Danny Bluestone, were invited onto BBC Three Counties Radio’s drive time to share their thoughts on using technology to help reinvigorate the UK’s stagnating high streets.

Cyber-Duck’s team came together to create six fantastic products in one weekend in the 2013 internal R&D weekend (Hackathon). The 18 Ducks devoted a weekend of hard-work to achieve some ambitious projects and display their areas of expertise.

‘Three Men and a Marketing Lady’ modified an antique cuckoo clock into a new notification system for our Cyber-Duck office. The uniquely designed structure signals twitter, email and error message alerts and is an impressive new feature on the office walls.

'Breaking Code' used their coding and design skills to create a new system to collate and measure client retainers. This innovative app manages time, budget and tasks all in one single location; a perfect new tool for Cyber-Duck.

The 'Grange Hill Gang' created a new app to replace school homework diaries, increasing the transparency for teachers and parents and ensuring clear instructions for pupils about their homework tasks.

'Sylvain and the Reiters' created an app to provide a new error message centre for Cyber-Duck developers. This will allow all error messages to be collated and managed in one place rather that overcrowding individual email inboxes.

Team 'DRADIS' created a bus tracking app that plots the progress of bus routes along maps in order to determine its arrival time at the bus stop.

At this year's Quack Hack, 'The Ponderos' created a new online portal that collates all the Cyber-Duck brand guidelines and document templates in one easily accessible location. The team designed a new website that will be a handy tool for the Ducks to access both internally and remotely.

On Monday 29th July, I spoke at the “Untangle the Web” event at Google Campus London.  I spoke about responsive web design, why it matters and imparted some real-world experiences from responsive design projects including the challenges we faced and the design decisions we made along the way.