Facebook is unifying its hardware efforts under a veteran exec and readying an ‘Aloha’ video chat device
Andrew Bosworth is taking over the company’s consumer hardware efforts including the Building 8 division, which is working on an unannounced video chat device codenamed Aloha
Facebook has tapped one of its most veteran execs to lead all of its consumer hardware efforts, including the mysterious Building 8 division responsible for its forthcoming video chat device.
Andrew “Boz” Bosworth will oversee Building 8 and Oculus, Facebook’s virtual reality arm, Business Insider has learned. The announcement was recently made inside Facebook by CTO Mike Schroepfer, and a company spokesperson confirmed the news to BI on Wednesday.
“We are excited about our long-term investments in virtual reality, augmented reality, and consumer hardware,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “We believe these new technologies have the potential to bring the world closer together in entirely new ways, and we’ve built great teams with strong leadership in each of these areas. Bringing these teams closer together will help us move even faster as we continue to invest in our 10-year roadmap.”
Bosworth has served as Facebook’s VP of ads and business platform for years, and was instrumental in the company’s early efforts to create the News Feed and Messenger. He’s been at the company for over a decade and is a close confidant to CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Another longtime Facebook ads engineering exec, Mark Rabkin, will assume Bosworth’s old responsibilities.