Hot New Gear From French Tech Tour Start-ups

French technology was on display last week at the Quadrus Conference Center in Menlo Park, Calif., where start-up companies participated in lightning-quick demos of their product offerings for venture capitalists, journalists and tech enthusiasts. Produced by Mission Economique-Ubifrance, the economic arm of the Embassy of France, the French Tech Tour 2009 was formally launched at Silicon Valley incubator Quadrus ahead of events in Paris and Strasbourg in early July.

A-Volute, winner of the top jury prize at the Menlo Park event, develops "3-D sound" technology that promises "unmatched spatial sensations" for audio presentation in video game consoles, music players and industrial or professional applications such as high-end simulators. The start-up's Nahimic technologies are based on A-Volute algorithms that process "10 times more sound sources in realtime" than other forms of audio enhancement, and include software and firmware drivers for computer sound cards as well as special recording equipment and headphones.

The TazCard from TazTag is the start-up's secured, contactless electronic wallet based on the Near Field Communication (NFC) short-range wireless connectivity technology and the Zigbee specification for high-level communication between low-power digital radios. TazTag also sells the TazKiosk, which it describes as "The first interactive NFC urban totem," and offers a Java-based software development kit.

Digitrad's Yes.tel is a unique digital ID for individual consumers that unifies the user's disparate online identities into a single point of contact -- his or her name. The company also has offerings called OrganiP and Stand4U targeting businesses, telcos, developers and hardware manufacturers. Digitrad is actively seeking reseller partners.

3DTV Solutions aims to lower the high cost of producing true 3-D video and film with its preconfigured, usage-specific camera systems that can be operated without needing to hire expensive technicians. The company also has developed technology it calls Distant Presence to capture, transmit and broadcast real-size, full-depth images in realtime that includes the camera system and a PC to manage the restitution of the image on an auto-stereoscopic screen.

SmartQuantum says it's figured out a way to shore up a key vulnerability in the transmission of digital data -- the pipe connecting firewall-protected systems in disparate locations. The trouble with the wires running across the countryside is that the bad guys can tap into them fairly easily and make off with poorly encrypted streams of traveling data without being detected. So, as its name suggests, SmartQuantum has replaced current secret-key-based digital cryptography with its own brand of "quantum cryptography" -- hitching data transfers to the actual photons riding on the optical link between legitimate users, so that any outside interference with the stream registers as a detectable disturbance in the quantum state of the data itself.

ABphone wants to funnel the world's mobile phone users through its multimedia aggregating portal of the same name. The search service for Web content steers users away from outside Web sites, driving them instead to images, video, games and music that may be hosted elsewhere but are played within the confines of the ABphone portal. The start-up's revenue model is based on advertising and subscriptions -- ABphone claims it already attracts "a substantial worldwide mobile audience."

The Biothentic fingerprint and smart-card combo from Orcanthus is just one biometrics-based offering from this specialist in identification and authentication technologies. Researchers at the start-up's parent company Id3, focusing on ASICs, imaging and communication sensors, first developed technologies for storing and matching fingerprint data on a smart card in 1999.

The tag line from Codasystem is, "Put a lawyer on your phone!" That's probably not most people's first thought when texting away, but the start-up is talking about Shoot and Proof -- the company's digital photo-tagging software for ensuring that the original version of an image is marked and cataloged as proof against any subsequent third-party tampering.

GigaTribe's proposal is file sharing that puts the labor burden on the recipient, without the use of torrents. The start-up's community-driven application is pretty simple -- it allows a user to give whole or partial access to his or her own hard drive to friends and family. So instead of compiling files to e-mail, burning on a CD, uploading or otherwise delivering to others, the file owner can relax and let the borrowers do all the work.