VentureBeat

Mobile investment was the official topic for the panel of venture capitalists at today’s MobileBeat conference in Sunnyvale, but the discussion focused on a more specific, sexy topic — Apple’s iPhone 3G, and especially its App Store.

Some of the attention came just because the App Store is the hot new thing right now. It launched earlier this month, and VentureBeat writer MG Siegler described it as “sublime beyond belief.” It has captured people’s imaginations, and is bringing a lot more attention to the mobile space. With all the interest, and with a better revenue-sharing deal (Apple normally gets 30 percent, compared to 40 or 50 percent for most carrier deals, according to Menlo Ventures’ Shawn Carolan) the iPhone is pretty tempting for app developers.

But the panelists didn’t just sing hosannas to Apple. For one thing, Rich Wong of Accel Partners noted that even if the store is an improvement on the old carrier-reliant model, it’s hardly an open environment.

“Well, Apple is a walled garden,” he said. “It’s just a different form of walled garden. … Hopefully it’s a more benevolent one.”

Even Rupert Young, who handles strategic investment at AT&T (which, remember, is the only network in the U.S. that carries the iPhone), noted that the App Store isn’t a boon for all developers. Once you leave the rarefied realm of the most popular applications and get down to, say, the 50th most downloaded app, “The numbers start to get small very quickly.”

Several speakers emphasized that despite the buzz it’s getting now, focusing exclusively on the iPhone would be a mistake. Wong, for example, said he wants startups to at least “intelligently hedge their bets across multiple platforms.”

It wasn’t all about the iPhone, even if it sometimes felt that way. The VCs also offered general tips about the applications and startups that they look to invest in. One piece of advice: Don’t try to try to compete with the big players by just creating a mobile copy of their sites. Instead, look for new needs that a mobile app can address.

“If you want to allow someone to keep track of friends’ lives and message with them and you just want to do that on mobile [competing with Facebook] — don’t,” Carolan said. “It’ll just be a complete waste of time.”

After years dominated by lumbering giants like Peregrine Systems and BMC Remedy, the customer service market is ripe for innovation, say executives at a startup called Parature. The company bootstrapped itself for several years, but chief executive Duke Chung sees a coming “land grab” as more companies enter the field and start targeting the smaller customers who have traditionally been ignored.

In order to keep up with the competition, Parature has been raising substantial amounts of cash — a $13.5 million first round back in 2006, and now $16 million led by Accel Partners.

The Vienna, Va. company says that through its software-as-a-service model and multi-tenant server architecture (in which a single server is used by several companies at once), it’s able to provide customer support software at a much lower price than the competition, putting it within reach of smaller startups that would normally just use email and in-house solutions. That setup also allows Parature to deploy and update its product much more quickly than traditional companies.

The startup has been refining its core product for several years, which emphasizes the customer service “portal” it creates for each client. By creating an easy-to-navigate site where users can find the information they need, and where members of the community can help each other through forums, Parature “deflects” numerous requests, freeing customer service representatives to focus on longer-term issues like improving the portals.

(There are other startups trying innovative approaches to customer service too, such as Satisfaction, a San Francisco startup that allows consumers to drive the service process.)

Accel Partner Rich Wong describes Parature as a company with the potential to become “the Salesforce.com of customer service” — namely, the pioneer and leader in providing customer service through a SaaS model. He was also impressed that, unbeknownst to him, several Accel companies like Trulia and Coremetrics were already using Parature.

Parature’s background is in many ways a classic startup story. Its founders, who initially saw Parature as a way to deliver tutoring software, started the company in a Cornell dorm room. Although its early offering was little more than instant messaging software and service, Parature started building momentum early on; a division of Hewlett Packard was its 14th customer, and started paying before the team had left that dorm room.

That momentum has continued building — the Vienna, Va.-based company now boasts more than 650 customers and has helped served around 10 million customer service requests to date. Much of that demand comes from Linden Lab, the company behind the enormously popular virtual world Second Life.

The company was already pretty successful in 2006, when it had around 300 customers, Chung adds. But he and his cofounders realized that they were losing potential clients to the larger salesforce of competitor RightNow, and if they wanted to continue growing, they needed to bulk up Parature’s sales team too.

“We were losing deals because we weren’t at the table,” Chung says.

He says his long-term goal is to one day make a similar boast to McDonald’s — “I’d like to eventually be able to say we served 1 billion customers.” That’s a distance off, but it sounds like Parature could one day make that dream a reality.

Existing investors Sierra Ventures, Valhalla Partners and angel investor Ching-Ho Fung also participated in the new round.