Gallic Fries: French Tech Tour Serves Up Hot Startups

Startup Soiree

For the past several years, the French agency for international business development, UBIFRANCE, has arranged for a handful of carefully selected French technology startups to visit Silicon Valley to meet potential investors and the press. This year's French Tech Tour brought 15 up-and-coming companies to the Quadrus Conference Center in Menlo Park, Calif., selected from among hundreds by a who’s who of tech firms including Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, Cisco, Fujitsu, Google, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, LG, McAfee, Microsoft, Nokia, Oracle, Panasonic, Qualcomm, RIM, Samsung, SanDisk, SAP, Sony, Symantec and Verisign.

Faster Traffic

ActivNetworks makes the BoostEdge network appliance, which accelerates Web traffic while reducing data flow for corporations and telecom operators who are facing Web fluidity issues. The company says its BoostEdge appliance can cut Web data traffic from six times to as much 30 times over non-installed sites, while response time is improved by as much as an order of magnitude. BoostEdge also ensures servers’ high availability and load handling, and getting the appliance into production at a customer site can be done in less than two hours.

Founded: 2004

Website: www.activnetworks.com

Type Different

AlphaUI makes an intuitive and ergonomic back-typing keyborad for mobile tablets. The user types text from behind with all his fingers, being naturally guided by the front screen. AlphaUI's BKFS (Back Key Front Screen) input system provides a unique interface in a handheld design, connected via standard USB or Bluetooth. For users of smaller tablet devices and smartphones, the standard two-finger input gives way to full use of eight fingers on a reduced number of standard-sized keys -- and it’s pretty easy to learn. AlphaUI claims that after just a week of use, most users will be able to type as fast as on a standard PC keyboard and much faster than they can on a small device’s mini keyboard.

Founded: 2008

Website: www.alphaui.com

Ear Today

Targeting mobile OEMs, Arkamys has developed a large portfolio of audio software libraries that improve the audio quality of any mobile devices during a phone call, while listening to music, watching videos or playing games, both for headphones and speakers output. The company’s technologies have been implemented on major ARM-based platforms and Arkamys' ImmerseU delivers surround sound, includes a complete 3D audio engine, reduces background noise on phone calls and cancels echoes in hands-free mode.

Founded: 1998

Website: www.arkamys.com

Power Bill Killer

AVOB's Energy Saver software promises to reduce IT infrastructure power consumption by up to 70 percent, according to the company. The AVOB solution lets IT system administrators instantly allocate computing power for desktop and notebook fleets depending on user needs, ensures that computers switch to sleep mode every time the user is away and monitors electrical, carbon and financial savings in real time.

Founded: 2003

Website: www.avob.fr

Thanks For The MEMS-ories

DelfMEMS makes a new generation of MEMS switches to treat radio-frequency signals, targeting both the electronic test and instrumentation industry and makers of wireless handset makers. DelfMEMS' broadband switching solutions allow electronic test and instrumentation companies to integrate more devices to perform System-on-Chip (SoC) parallel testing. For the mobile communications industry, the company plans to post-process MEMS on top of CMOS wafer delivered by front-end modules manufacturers to fabricate tunable duplexers for the LGE-4G protocol.

Founded: 2005

Website: www.delfmems.com

Measuring Success

EcoVadis is a sustainable supply management software firm that has created a collaborative platform that allows companies to assess the environmental and social performance of their global suppliers. EcoVadis combines Web technologies and corporate social responsibility expertise in a cloud-based platform, collecting and verifying data to deliver simple supplier scorecards. The EcoVadis database covers 150 purchasing categories, 120 countries, and 21 corporate social responsibility indicators.

Founded: 2007

Website: www. ecovadis.com

Future Shock

LASTER Technologies makes mobile informative eyewear that delivers augmented reality to the wearer. LASTER's Smart Vision intelligent glasses are compatible with the majority of existing digital sources like cellphones, PDAs, DVD players, laptops and video game consoles. Based on the company’s patented EnhancedView technology, Smart Vision provides users with a large, enhanced field of view to watch high definition 2D or 3D images, videos and text.

Founded: 2005

Website: www.laster.fr

A Better Mouse Trap

LEXIP's 3D mice are suitable for both professional and personal use. These intuitive and easy-to-use devices are identical to standard 2D mice except for the addition of a pivot inside. Pressing down the body of 3D mouse forward or backward, to the right or left or using the joystick allows the user to simultaneously pan, zoom and rotate 3D models or environments. LEXIP software also allows users to tailor the use of the mouse to their own preferences in areas like speed and rotation sensibility.

Founded: 2005

Website: www.lexip.fr

A Network In The Cloud

LYaTiss is developing software that it says will help ISPs expose new resources and bandwidth-hungry services to end users by fully integrating the network into the cloud landscape. The company's software products enable the composition and on-demand allocation of high-quality, composite virtual environments which it calls Virtual Private eXecution infrastructures (ViPXi).

Founded: 2010

Website: www.lyatiss.com

Secure In The Web

MLState's OPA is designed to build and run secure Web applications. The company describes OPA as a thin, homogenous layer that replaces the heterogeneous stack of software used today, such as Apache + PHP + MySQL + Symfony, or similar technologies. And it’s resistant to most Web vulnerabilities, according to MLState, while allowing users to create safe and strongly secure Web-based solutions which are also faster to develop and easier to maintain for both mobile and desktop platforms.

Founded: 2007

Website: www.mlstate.com

Going Mobile

Mobile Distillery's Celsius technology was built to enable corporations to develop and run their applications on all existing phones, while promising a "future proof" benefit for coming platforms as well. Celsius reduces the time spent porting and backfilling by 80 percent, according to Mobile Distillery, while development schedules can be cut by up to 30 percent.

Founded: 2005

Website: www.mobile-distillery.com

Digital DNA

Mobilegov’s ID4YOO is a single-sign on for the Web based on strong authentication derived from what the user already ’owns’ -- for example, a computer, phone or USB key. As a cloud authentication server, ID4YOO stores all the "Digital DNA" of users and the related identifier and login-password for a specific Web site. Instead of entering the login-password for each Web site, the user experience just authenticates to the ID4YOO platform once, by using the device with which they enrolled.

Founded: 2004

Website: www.mobilegov.com

Building Trust

Prim'vision offers mobile marketing and advertising solutions based on its Smart Access technology, and claims to ’get very close to holy grail of advertising: one-on-one marketing.’ The company uses self-learning agent profiles, contextual user profiles with 3D avatar representation and a marketing toolkit to define and manage campaigns, all to provide targeted, customizable marketing and advertising to specific online users.

Founded: 2007

Website: www.prim-vision.com

The Pleasure Of Leisure

Relaxnews bills itself as the world’s first and only rich media online platform dedicated to leisure and lifestyle news. Available through its online platform or XML feed, Relaxnews offers stories and multimedia reports on well-being, house and home, entertainment and tourism that are syndicated out to newsrooms, agencies and other organizations to provide to their audiences.

Founded: 2007

Website: www.relaxnews.com

Video Assistant

UbicMedia’s PUMit System is a distributed, cloud-based toolkit used to efficiently distribute, maximize reach and monetize video files over the Internet with robust security. The PUM file offers securely self-protected content, encourages copying and enhances viral distribution and sales, and is always subject to viewing conditions set by the rights holder, while also allowing the rights holder to to keep track of content usage, regardless of which media it is played on.

Founded: 2007

Website: www.ubicmedia.com