The best mobile group chat application I've ever tried just got paired up with the world's biggest social network. While details are light right now, TechCrunch accurately has reported that Beluga, the group messaging service founded by former Googlers, has been acquired by Facebook. This buy comes at a time when discussion of group texting services is practically at an all time high, with SXSW 2011 looming on the horizon. The purchase is a big win for Facebook who gets an incredibly innovative team and service, and gives an amazingly fast exit for the small group, who launched the app (on this blog first) prior to Christmas 2010.

In late January, I predicted Beluga would be one of the biggest hits at the upcoming SXSW event. It's incredibly easy to use, fun, cross-platform, and provides real value to event goers. Facebook doesn't have the best track record of supporting apps when they are acquired, but TechCrunch says Beluga will "function as it does today." That sounds a lot like how FriendFeed has stayed open without change for almost two years, but who knows how this one will play out?

Other players in the group messaging space include GroupMe, TextPlus, FastSociety and tangentially, Yobongo, who should also be interesting to watch at SXSW.

The company's fast exit shouldn't come as much of a surprise to ardent Valley watchers. Om Malik, in one of our Beluga chats, said "it is a great team and this company is going to be snapped up in months if not in a year," on February 18th. When I saw Facebook CTO Bret Taylor join the service on February 23rd, that should have been my first clue something was up.

When FriendFeed was purchased by Facebook, it didn't mean much for the initial service, but many of the features of FriendFeed have made it into the social network. If Beluga goes the same route, we should expect dramatically improved mobile messaging, location integration and smart groups. Can't wait.

From Beluga's Site: (Beluga is now friends with Facebook)

"Beluga and Facebook are committed to create new and better ways to communicate and share group experiences. For now, Beluga will continue to function as it does today. Your Beluga account and data will not be lost."

Today, MyLikes unveiled a bundle of strong announcements that show the company continues to get significant traction, becoming the go to word of mouth recommendation service that lets people get paid through their streams, videos and blogs. About 10 months after the company gained seed funding from former Googlers and an advisory board (myself included), they have announced the raise of $5.5 million in Series A funding, led by Khosla Ventures. In addition, Gmail and FriendFeed founder Paul Buchheit is joining the company's board of directors. In parallel, the company has debuted its first apps for Android and iPhone. Big day.

Unlike traditional advertising platforms which are run of site or based contextual data, such as the page being viewed or the search executed, MyLikes is centered around personal recommendations from friends. If there is a good match of potential advertisers to one's interests, sharing a "like" becomes easy. The service has gained high visibility, not just in the Silicon Valley bubble, but even with A-list celebrities like the Khardasians - kid you not. Advertisers on MyLikes include Coca Cola, Microsoft, Sony Music, Axe Hair products and more.

Paul Buchheit's joining the board of MyLikes is especially intriguing due to his history at Google, where he is credited not just for launching Gmail, but AdSense as well. So this guy knows a ton about advertising success and should provide valuable feedback to MyLikes. He's also been in the trenches at Facebook before joining Y! Combinator earlier this year. I believe the role is Paul's first board of directors position.

For MyLikes, going mobile makes sense as well. The MyLikes On the Go app is now available on iPhone and Twitter, so active participants can get notifications for relevant campaigns on their smartphones, where they can instantly post likes to their streams, be it Twitter, YouTube or Facebook. Where the company can win and get even more visible is through true personal recommendations. There are two things wrong with ads today - that they are interruptive or irrelevant. MyLikes is solving for relevance, and the ads never get in the way of what you want to see.

Also joining the board of directors today is Alex Kinnier, partner at Khosla Ventures, who led the round. Existing investors including Lightseed Partners and Metamorphic Ventures, contributed.

DISCLOSURE: I am an unpaid advisor to MyLikes. I hold a small equity stake in the company.

If you're anything like me, you've got a ton of gadgets from different sources that should talk to each other well and interoperate, but often don't. From laptops to cell phones to video game systems, TVs, stereo equipment, wireless hubs, DVRs to the more mundane home electronic systems, you probably wish things worked together a lot better - with fewer remote controls and less regimented ways of getting things done. As for me, I'm great about buying the best stuff, but terrible about optimizing it. I know my strengths, and that's never been one of them. The good thing is that other people are, and I've teamed up with a good friend of mine to help get my house wired - the right way - over the next year.

Tom Abell, who runs the great blog Home System Integration (subscribe now), is focused on making all the devices in your home work together. So when I told him that I'd moved into a new place last summer and hadn't even taken the baby steps like putting our flat screen TVs on the walls, he knew I would be a long-term project. So I put my trust in him, and between us both, we've completely revamped my home entertainment system, both downstairs and upstairs (in my office, which doubles as a den).

Starting downstairs, with our family room, we added a Denon amplifier as the centerpiece to the system, plus a Dolby surround sound 5.1 theater system with an amazing subwoofer. The front speakers are wired from the TV, with the rear speakers getting audio wirelessly via bluetooth (from Rocketfish), suspended off our walls, masked by molding that matched the room so their connections are inconspicuous.

We then connected it all with a Logitech device that lets us control the TV, TiVo, DVD player, Apple TV and Nintendo Wii from a single screen. And wherever we could use HDMI, we did. Last night, the rumbling during Inception was enough to make my wife ask if we had an earthquake. So consider that a success.

Upstairs wasn't as big a job, but a place where I spend a lot more hours, so it had to be solid. As with downstairs, Tom and I posted the TV on the wall with a new wall mount and we also got a new entertainment center that matches my desk and is capable of locking to keep my kids' fingers out. We again leveraged HDMI everywhere, and now have the TiVo, Wii, DVD/VCR combo, Airport Extreme, Apple Time Capsule and Sonos ZoneBridge all in one place, neatly cabled. The difference is incredible. We also salvaged the Bose subwoofer and speaker setup from downstairs and brought it upstairs, so the sound is great up here too. In time, I'll probably purchase an all-in-one remote from Logitech to run the place.


Now that the entertainment side is in great shape, I wonder about being able to manage the rest of my home by computer or by any one of my mobile gadgets, be it via iPad or Android phone. Between Tom and me, there's got to be a good way to mess with the thermostat or turn off lights around the house without leaving my seat. I lust after Google Powermeter, but haven't seen that widely used yet. There should be a Web interface for the dishwasher to see how full it is and set a regular schedule. Same with the sprinklers in our front and back yard, or the lights that come on by our driveway that should start at dusk, but usually come on around midnight and stay lit until four a.m.

So yes, there is work to be done. While I may be more focused on mobile apps, trends and Web services, Tom has put together a number of solid pieces on the connected home, the home theater PC (HTPC), and Windows Home Server. He's also a contributor to Hometoys.com, which I started reading the last few months, and is on Twitter at @home_integrate.

If you're in the Bay Area, and suffer from gadget glut or just want to get them connected, it's my pleasure to recommend Tom. He promised to use me as a guinea pig, and our entire family has benefited from his strategy and physical labor, without a question. For the rest of you outside the area, make sure to check out his blog to get caught up on the world of home automation. I'm hoping to become more of an expert myself in the next 12 months, and filling some of my own knowledge holes in this space. Should be a fun challenge.

It is with pleasure I can say I never got an MBA and I didn't get a marketing degree. I never even took a marketing class, and when first told I should go into Marketing, I was concerned about having to go door to door to get customers. So don't throw me in a big pile of suit-wearing glad-handing shiny smiling hucksters trying to spin lead into gold.

But as someone who has a dozen years in Marketing roles in the Silicon Valley, I have been watching this weekend's skirmish about the value of Marketing (or lack thereof) for technology companies, spawned by Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson, (who is a great blogger besides) with considerable interest. I know that we are in an industry that makes rockstars out of code jockeys, and who values warehouses and incubators full of entrepreneurial engineers who site side by side at long tables encumbered by little more than computer terminals and close access to shared cafeterias. But for every company that has managed to subsist primarily on word of mouth from customer to customer, growing without any marketing push, there are many more who would value greatly from the help, and others who actually do make marketing a key component of their efforts. Seeing the difference is obvious.

In Fred's first missive against Marketing, since followed on by two more posts, he stated simply, "I believe that marketing is what you do when your product or service sucks or when you make so much profit on every marginal customer that it would be crazy to not spend a bit of that profit acquiring more of them." He argued headcount dollars should be exclusively focused on product development and engineering, to encourage social hooks, leverage industry events, avoid outsourcing PR, deliver focused SEO and above all, build a great product. Despite the leading quote, which I disagree with, he makes some solid points which parallel my view as well. (His comments in the second post also outlined some of the shortcomings in the first post)

The issue is this. Many engineers have great ideas and are very bad at explaining these ideas. They may have smart ideas and can't get the point across to customers, partners, press, VCs, or any influential folks. Often, engineers are so heads-down in their code they don't adequately understand the competition and their strengths and weaknesses. They don't know what people are saying about their products or those of the competition and don't know the backgrounds of people making comments.

Marketing is not about jumping in to save a sucky product. God help those marketeers who have to work with sucky products. That cannot be fun. Marketing is about translating geeks' efforts for human beings, reducing sales cycles and translating intrigue into value.

Marketing is often called in to help analyze the product to determine its benefits, to collaborate on the feature roadmap, to influence the influencers, and make the many tweaks in the product and the way it is described to graduate it from a good product to an amazing one.

The most valuable technology company in the world today is Apple and they do incredible marketing in practically every respect in how their products are designed, executed, sold and discussed. Wilson's argument could match Apple's, saying their profit per customer is so high that they should spend more, but the company has achieved a cult-like status through delivering through traditional Marketing efforts a way to make you think something which is possibly marginally better than the competition is dramatically so and has no equal. Nike, Sony, BMW and many other household names deliver panache that enables them to drive higher profits and premiums by making equivalent seem extraordinary.

Silicon Valley (and its ecosystem, not geographically limited) seems tilted against marketing as a discipline now thanks to the high profile successes of a handful of companies that let the network effect drive them. Google's product leadership practically all have engineering backgrounds. Twitter and Facebook, LinkedIn and Foursquare all relied on viral mechanisms to grow astronomically with relatively imperceptible marketing. Google famously avoided traditional advertising for most of its life. It's got geeky marketers often feeling like they are on the outside looking in, unable to make an impact at some of the industry's top startups. But have you ever seen the typical cofounder describe their product or give a presentation for any more than ten minutes? Have you seen a product manager sit down with an eager reporter asking more than softball questions, cringing at what they might say, or how their personal oddities could submarine the company's reputation? I have. Many times.

And besides, think of all the many products Google does have that should get a Marketing push that you've never heard of. Google Code? Web Elements? HotPot? Buzz? Sometimes I am tearing my hair out watching companies that should market this stuff sit relatively idle.

My first real marketing job came in 1999, when I was tasked with running a consumer Web company's Web site, writing product descriptions, FAQs, customer support interaction, press releases, etc. At a nine or ten person company, basically anything that wasn't code came my way, made extra challenging by the development team being Russian. So I was constantly translating Russian English into real English and hoping it made sense on the other side. We had a great product for online conference calls, faxing, Web meetings, which was arguably comparable to WebEx. But WebEx had a $35 million marketing budget, including budget for a Super Bowl commercial starring Ru Paul, and we got eaten alive. Working relatively for free, we were lucky enough to be covered in TMCNet and others and attract thousands of customers to our low-end plans before Oracle came calling in mid 2001 to buy the company.

More recently, in my Marketing role with my6sense, there is some of the same element - translating Israeli English to "real" English (they'll forgive me for saying so), and again, being challenged with a fantastic idea with real value, and translating it to customer benefits, finding new opportunities for partners and discussing future roadmap plans. Our recent launch of a Chrome extension for Twitter.com, the first step beyond mobile, gained coverage from practically all the top tech blogs in our space, and pushed significant new customers. We clearly lack some of the social elements in our application for virality today, and have more work to do on the Web site, messaging, etc, but without efforts to expand our customer base directly and through influencers, we would be much further behind.

Marketing often gets a bad rap in today's world because it is seen as a cost center. In my 8 1/2 years at a network storage startup from 2001 to 2009, I started in a role of eMarketing Manager and grew into the role of Director, Corporate Marketing, seeing all parts of the marketing, PR and business development craft - good and bad, through high times and recession. When budgets were eviscerated in 2001 to 2003 following the 9/11 attacks and global economic slowness, I violently made sure I was not part of the problem, but part of the solution,finding ways to bring new customers for free or inexpensively, avoiding high-cost advertising and maintaining high visibility for the company when others were going out of business.

Smart marketing does not have to be expensive - and smart companies would not invest in high costs with low return. I do not believe in high priced sponsorships for trade shows. I do not believe in run of site banner ads and sponsorships. I do not believe in demanding flashy collateral or Web demos when simplicity rules the day. I do not believe in valuing one's success based on Facebook fans and Twitter followers but in real deals, customers and dollars. Smart marketers will adjust to the new world of communication, partnerships and PR instead of digging in their toes and getting outflanked by those more flexible.

What's needed in Marketing for these changing times is for the average Marketeer to get more technical. One must grasp the venues where your products can be distributed, must know how to speak the customers' language, and must be working hand in hand with the product development team to deliver a top-quality experience. We're not rated by how much we spend. We're rated by how much we deliver, and there are too many products out there today - many I get pitched on - that could use a little retouching by somebody who knows something about Marketing.