Recently I caught up with Ross Hill, Entrepreneur – founder of Yabble , organiser of The Hive Melbourne and he currently works part time in the Innovation Program at Deloitte Australia where he also advises Deloitte on social media strategy both locally and globally.
He spoke about how The Hive got started, what’s happening in the tech/entrepeneurial scene in Melbourne at the moment and how a lot of people involved in the online/tech/digital industry here tend to have a side-project they are running – on top of their ‘day job.’
To find out about more about the tech scene in Melbourne, I used Twitter to follow the industry’s movers and shakers, and found a lot of Melbournians’s were using Foursquare. Interestingly, Ross said that although people using it is smaller in volume compared to other cities, he said quite often once he checks-in somewhere he’ll get someone approach him to say ‘hi!’. Having been back for a little while, I definitely get the sense that the tech scene here is much more unified and intimate than bigger cities across Europe and USA.
Ross also mentioned a similar service called SCVNGR which is a game about going places, doing challenges and earning points – which is another twist to ‘just checking-in’ and users are given real-time missions and creating brand awareness.
He also spoke about what he perceives as the role of the Social Media Manger/Agency and suggested that as brands, companies and employees move towards a world where everyone may have an identity online, their role was to educate and bring people up to speed with social media techniques and tools. I would agree with this, but I think this role will move beyond the educator – and in some cases they already have – because companies need to hire someone in-house to take over these duties and it’s something they need to budget for, rather than over spilling into the PR assistant’s role.
Finally, Ross mentioned some of his favourite Australian-born startups included Spreets, Rentoid and RedBubble. There is also a solid list of ‘Awesome Tech Melbourne Startups’ collated by Ned Dwyer here – which goes to show that the tech spirit in Melbourne is well and truly thriving!
It was great to pick Ross Hill’s brain – so I thank him for his time, as he was a fountain of knowledge about the tech/ entrepreneurial scene in my home town. If you are ever in Melbourne be sure to say ‘Hi’ and follow Ross on Twitter here.
Enjoy the video interview below!
This was shot on a Kodak Zi8.
