Sonos appoints software veteran Hugo Barra to its board after app troubles

As Sonos continues a company-wide effort to redeem itself aft last year’s app snafu, it’s adding a well-known manufacture sanction to its committee of directors. This morning, Sonos announced that Hugo Barra is joining the committee to regenerate Mike Volpi, who is stepping down aft 15 years — the longest tenure of immoderate committee member.

Barra has a agelong resume that includes elder enactment positions astatine companies including Google, wherever he’s credited with starring “the Android ecosystem from nascency done its archetypal cardinal users.” After that, helium moved onto Xiaomi and spent 3 years overseeing planetary operations for the influential Chinese telephone manufacturer. Barra’s adjacent halt was Meta, wherever helium served arsenic vice president of the company’s Oculus virtual world division.

He’s presently the co-founder and caput of merchandise astatine /dev/agents, which is described arsenic “a bundle institution gathering a next-generation operating strategy for AI agents.” For now, it sounds similar Sonos is gladsome to person Barra due to the fact that he’s got a beardown way grounds of delivering results — but those AI ties mightiness beryllium utile down the road.

“He has a proven quality to crook cutting-edge innovation into large products — a large acceptable for Sonos,” committee seat Julius Genachowski said in a property release. “With his heavy expertise, including successful AI, we’re excited to person him connected the Board, engaging with the enactment squad and adding value.”

Sonos remains focused connected delivering show improvements, bug fixes, and caller features (along with immoderate still-missing aged ones) to its mobile app connected Android and iOS. As portion of that renewed effort, the institution decided to cancel its adjacent hardware product, a streaming video subordinate codenamed Pinewood, which was archetypal reported past period by The Verge.

The company’s merchandise roadmap is successful flux to immoderate grade for the clip being, but different projects successful the works see a dedicated audio video receiver and a follow-up to the Era 100 astute speaker, which recently got a terms cut. I’m told by sources wrong the institution that morale among employees has mostly been connected the upswing successful caller months arsenic interim CEO Tom Conrad — who seems apt to get the occupation officially — takes steps to close the people and shingle up Sonos’ enactment ranks.