WWOS.com.au is now on your mobile

Our mobile team are proud to announce that the WWOS mobile site is now live.

on WWOS mobile:

• Up-to-the-minute sports news
• Live Scores and Results
• Sport specific mini sites – AFL, Basketball, Cricket, Football, Golf, Horse Racing, NRL, Rugby Union, Motor Sports and Tennis.
• Calendar
• Feature mini sites – Formula 1 Grand Prix, 2008 Olympic Games, Wimbledon etc.

Try it now

• WWOS mobile is free to access and is available on every Australian network.
• Enter m.wwos.com.au into your mobile browser
• Or SMS ‘SPORT’ to 19 34 34. Then simply click on the link we send you (we will only send you one SMS).
• (Cost 55c. This service is not available to 3 Mobile customers)

Over the next few weeks we will be promoting the site on the mobilise and WWOS websites and across the ninemsn network.  We’ll also be launching Live Score alerts and looking at how we can make the site even better. If you have any suggestions, please leave me a comment.

Daily scrum: my way

I’ve written before that the most important meeting of my day is the Daily Scrum. For those not aware of what Scrum is or the Daily Scrum check out http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/daily_scrum.

I’m sure every team has a slight variation on the way their scrum’s work but I thought I’d share how we do it.

At 10am every morning we have a stand up meeting by the whiteboard.

From my fuzzy mobile phone picture you can see the task slips (or battleships as the team has referred to them). These are automatically created from the scrum excel template and provide an excellent visible guide on how the project is tracking. The five columns are Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog, In Progress, Complete and Deferred.

So in the daily scrum meeting (4 developers, 1 Program Manager) we move the task slips and ask the three questions;what did you do yesterday, what are you doing today and what impediments are in your way.

Anything that requires in-depth discussion we talk about it away from the Scrum unless it will benefit it all. I also try to plan a half hour gap after the meeting to try and fix the impediments straight away.

All pretty much textbook stuff. What the books, blogs and website don’t really go into is personality which I think is key to making it work. A daily meeting can be a chore at best so also use the time to catch up as a team, talk about the weekend or things we get up to. It’s only for a couple of minutes but I think it’s good team bonding time. I also pass on any business updates or things I’m working on so they know what’s coming along in the pipeline. Be energetic in your discussions, monotony will make the process ultimately fail.

Another key is to fully explain the process and why it’s useful. In the Scrum try and get discussions going amongst the developers, it’s amazing some of the thoughts that can come out of a 2 minute discussion. Also as the project leader, the team needs to trust you, so the question isn’t “WHAT DID YOU DO YESTERDAY?” but more how is the project going and what successes or troubles are you facing. It is not a tool to push people harder.

We’ve now had hundreds of daily scrums and I don’t think there’s been one where it hasn’t been useful. We do stray away from the theory a little but we do still keep the meeting to within 15 minutes and the major elements are there. Just make sure you add energy and personality and enjoy the successes of a well informed team.

Work/MBA/Life balance

Today it was reported that Australians are sleeping less than they did 10 years ago. No surprise there with more TV channels and multiple mediums of entertainment.

For those of you out there studying or about to study for your MBA, your daily schedule will be very important to you. I thought I’d give you my view on how I balance work, life and my MBA.

This is my typical day (and I’m fairly strict with it):

5:30am to 7:00am – wake up and take the dogs for a walk
7:00am to 7:30am- spend some quality time with my wife and son.
8:00am to 9:00am – gym
9:00am – start work
6:30pm – leave work (luckily I only live 15 minutes from work)
6:45 to 7:15pm – read Jackson a story and put him to bed
7:15pm to 8:00pm – dinner and wife-time
8:00pm to 10:00pm – study
10:00pm to 10:30pm -wind down time
10:30pm – bed

It’s a full on day but a few things to note is that I try my best to study for a coupe of hours everyday. Chipping away at the MBA work is really important and a lot less stressful in the longrun. The other thing is to keep slotting in time for your family, even if it’s half an hour at least it’s some quality time.

If you to drop anything from the list you would probably ditch the gym right? Well that’s what I did initially when I started my MBA and it turned out to be a big mistake from my point of view. The two things that will defeat you when studying is stress and fatigue. The gym is great way to kick start your day, de-stress and it will give you the energy to push through both on your study and work. For my it’s critical, and hey I look better for it!

Happy studying!!!

Newsroom of the future

Chris O’Brien discusses the newsroom of the future.

I’m new to all this Newsy stuff but I’ve seen first hand the benefits of ninemsn and the National Nine News team sitting together. Technology, whatever it is, cannot replace the 360 feedback you get from face-to-face conversation and as they say in the article, who would want to miss out on the energy a breaking news story generates.

I know the stock exchange lost the energy when they moved brokers to screen starers but they benefited from speed and accuracy. A virtual newroom would benefit neither of those.

Anyway, Chris is amongst other to organise The Next Newsroom Conference on April 3-4 at Duke University. Registration is now open.

Max, are you going to be flying me business class?

NewsSpace

Our lovely competitors at News Limited have just launched NewsSpace, an integrated trade site for the media industry.

All credit to them, they’ve done a good job with some really nice functionality.

http://www.newsspace.com.au

Of course, all media buyers please ignore and go to ninemsn!

New laptop coming?

At work we currently all have the Toshiba M400 Tablet PC (my last company I had the M200). I love this machine, the keyboard is great to type on and its very solid considering how much I abuse it everyday. However it is slow (even the though the specs are good) and like others the fan is constantly on so battery life is never more than an hour and a half…just enough for the average meeting.

Anyway, i was wondering past IT yesterday and spotted the recently hyped M700. From all the review to date this is one kick arse machine, with lots of grunt and a new LCD screen.

I’ll put my hands up to be on the company trial and let you know if the hype is justified.

ninemsn and Yahoo7

As you can imagine I’m getting a lot of questions about Microsoft attempting to buy Yahoo and I’d love to give me full opinion about it, but for fear of loosing my job I’ll leave it for the professional commentary.

ZDNet have followed up on yesterday’s piece, with another good article on the potential takeover.

I don’t necessarily agree that it will be all doom and gloom for either joint venture for the simple reason that cross-media selling has been so popular with media buyers. The media seems to forget about display advertising (video or images) rather than simple textural results which only work in one medium (search results).

Advertisers are still slow on moving to the online world with their large audience figures (compared to traditional mediums such as radio) and as they do over the next year it wouldn’t make any sense to break up either ventures. Keep them separate and draw in the dollars.

…opps I’m giving my opinion…

General update – Microsoft/Yahoo/Publish2

Things have been very busy at ninemsn working on two large high-profile projects which I’ll blog about in the coming weeks.

Couple of things of interest over the last few weeks:

Microsoft joins DataPortability: I had a chat with David Treadwell a few weeks ago about Microsoft joining and his thoughts seem very much inline with that of the group at DataPortability.org. For those who haven’t been following the Live cloud, you really should. From the small buzzes around town it’ll be a key component of Windows 7 and to be able to share that data with other services and social networks could be very powerful.

Microsoft buying Yahoo: There’s been a lot of commentary about this in the States and I doubt Steve Ballmer thought one bit about Australia but it does pose some interesting questions about the two competing joint ventures (ninemsn & Yahoo7) over here. ZDNet has done a great job on putting some of the numbers together for Australia.

Publish2: Stumbled upon this yesterday and found it interesting. I’ve registered but still waiting to get approved. I’ll let you know some of the ins and outs of the service…if I get in!

On the personal side, I’ve been busy studying Accounting for my MBA so expect some study notes soon.