When asked by fellow entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky about the company’s future plans, Andrey said that the main priority at the moment was growing the user base in the USA.
This was followed by a presentation where Jessica Powell talked about some of the most popular interests among Badoo users: Football was popular across most countries, but interestingly, tech gadgets seemed to score pretty low. This goes to show how Badoo is a mass market product that caters for everybody, not just early adopters of technology: “We need to cater to our users’ needs not the needs of tech geeks,” she said.
The audience was then showed a graph that illustrated how Badoo mimics real-life interactions, with men starting most chats by approaching women. Once women were engaged in conversation, however, they became much chattier, often surpassing the men in number of chats.
Badoo’s Keynote was sandwiched between talks from two other hot start-ups: Airbnb and Dropbox. Before Andrey took to the stage, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky talked about his vision for a ‘sharing economy’. Sharing, he said, was something that was hardwired into our DNA, and that after post-war individualism we are now seeing a return to it. This tied in nicely with Badoo’s philosophy, which relies on another basic human need: meeting new people and interacting with them.
Badoo’s session had great worldwide coverage: The Wall Street Journal called it a “social network that straddles the physical and virtual worlds,” while Israel’s biggest Financial site, Globes, reported on how Badoo is planning to crack the US market. One of the leading tech editors in Austria also wrote about Badoo in Futurezone, saying that it could be set to “follow Skype and Spotify to be the next big 'Made in Europe' web success – breathing some new life in to this old continent.”
Click here to view the full video of Badoo’s talk at DLD, and do get in touch to let us know what you think!