Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Badoo Does More Than Flirt With Google’s Ben Ling; It Hires Him as COO

Longtime Google product guy Ben Ling will become COO of Badoo, the London-based social discovery company with 35 million active monthly users, as The Wall Street Journal reported this morning.

Ling had worked closely with Google’s Marissa Mayer on various products in search and local, and had for a brief time joined Facebook before returning to Google via YouTube.

Badoo is a site for meeting and flirting with people that is increasingly used through mobile apps.

Badoo CMO Jessica Powell also came from Google, where she was previously a communications exec, as did Badoo’s head of engineering, Gene Sokolov.

The company said Ling will be in charge of product, engineering, business operations, partnerships and mergers and acquisitions.

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There’s a lot of attention and PR around Marissa, but their product lineup just kind of blows.

— Om Malik on Bloomberg TV, talking about Yahoo, the September issue of Vogue Magazine, and our overdependence on Google