1. Hugo Barra is a Brazilian computer scientist, technology executive and entrepreneur.
22 Facts About Hugo Barra
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Hugo Barra was class president of the Class of 2000 and student keynote speaker at MIT Commencement 2000.
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In 1999, Hugo Barra co-founded mobile software startup Lobby7 with other MIT classmates with investment from SoftBank Group.
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Hugo Barra joined American technology company Google in London in March 2008 as Group Product Manager for the Google Mobile team.
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In 2010 Hugo Barra joined the Android team as Director of Product Management.
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Hugo Barra headlined the main keynote presentation at Google IO 2011, Google IO 2012, and Google IO 2013.
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Hugo Barra was promoted to Vice President of Android Product Management in 2012.
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In September 2013, Hugo Barra left Google for Chinese electronics company Xiaomi, serving as Vice President of Global Operations based in Beijing, China.
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In February 2014, Hugo Barra announced the launch of the new Redmi and Mi 3 smartphones in Singapore.
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In March 2014, Hugo Barra visited Terry Gou at Foxconn in Shenzhen, a Taiwan-based global company with plants in Asia, Brazil and Mexico responsible for assembling products for various tech brands, indicating plans for Xiaomi to further expand into India, Indonesia and Latin America.
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In February 2016, Hugo Barra launched the Redmi Note 3 smartphone in India at a major press event in New Delhi's Talkatora Stadium with 8,000 fans in attendance where the company announced the world's first smartphone to use the Qualcomm Snapdragon 650 chipset.
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Hugo Barra led the expansion of Xiaomi into several other markets such as Southeast Asia, Latin America, Western Europe, Russia, and even led a modest early entry into the US, developing and promoting not only Xiaomi smartphones but products from its Mi Ecosystem of smart connected products, including wearables, TVs, home appliances, toys, and many others.
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Around the time of his resignation, Xiaomi announced that it had exceeded US$1 billion in revenue from India alone and went on to become the largest smartphone brand in India in Q3 2017, months after Hugo Barra left the company.
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On 25 January 2017 Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on his Facebook page that Hugo Barra would be joining Facebook as Vice President of Virtual Reality and Head of the Oculus division, including a photo of the two of them posing as avatars in a virtual scene.
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Hugo Barra's initial focus at Oculus was on the development of standalone VR headsets as well as social VR applications.
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On 11 October 2017 during the Oculus Connect 4 developer conference, Zuckerberg and Hugo Barra unveiled Oculus Go, the industry's first mass-market standalone VR headset, priced at $199.
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On 26 September 2018, Zuckerberg and Hugo Barra were back on stage at Oculus Connect 5 to announce Oculus Quest, the next major development in standalone VR technology.
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In September 2020, Hugo Barra announced on Twitter that Facebook and Ray-Ban were working on a partnership to co-develop smartglasses, which officially launched on 9 September 2021 as Ray-Ban Stories just a few months after Hugo Barra had left the company.
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In May 2021, Hugo Barra left Meta and immediately joined Detect, a health technology startup he was involved in co-founding.
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Since March 2020, Hugo Barra has been involved in various roles with Detect, a health technology startup he co-founded with scientist and entrepreneur Jonathan Rothberg to develop consumer-grade molecular diagnostics products.
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Hugo Barra is married with two children and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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Hugo Barra is a member of the World Economic Forum Young Global Leaders Class of 2015.