UbiFrance’s 7th annual French Tech Tour has released the names of the 16 startups that have been selected for a one week trip to the Silicon Valley. For those unfamiliar with the French Tech Tour, the tour’s finalists are selected by the very companies who will see the startups: this year’s companies include Amazon, AT&T, BT, Cisco, Dell, eBay, Fujitsu, HP, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Panasonic, Qualcomm, Salesforce, Samsung, SAP, Sprint, Symantec et Verizon.
In addition to having the possibility to meet face-to-face with decision makers in the above companies (who, obviously, choose companies that they themselves would like to do business with), companies also have the ability to organize outside meetings during the week as well as take advantage of Ubifrance’s team to organize meetings. Year-round, Ubifrance provides services to French startups to make meetings with potential clients & partners on a per-meeting cost model.
For the French Tech Tour, participating startups will get the opportunity to sell to big-name potential clients & partners, to get that first foot in the door. In addition, they will get a little more visibility in the Silicon Valley startup scene – alumnus BIME from the 2012 edition, for example, received this article in Venturebeat. Lastly, these startups will learn a bit more about expanding their French operations over to the US, speaking with entrepreneurs about their experiences in the US market.
There are some pretty interesting startups in this year’s edition – some we’ve written about, others i’m just learning about today. Here’s the list of 16 startups, as described on the French Tech Tour‘s homepage:
- Brainwave – Brainwave Identity GRC is a business software solution aimed at building an “identity and access information warehouse” to deliver a 360° view of users and access rights throughout a business’s IT resources and applications.
- Co-Decision – Co-Decision provides a new generation of Business Intelligence software suites. The suite is based on a man-machine co-decider with embedded professional human reasoning rules and cyber trackers that can make sense of Big Data, and anticipate risks and opportunities.
- Cognik – CogniK’s solution combines big data with cognitive sciences to provide reliable TV and video recommendations without having to collect enormous amounts of information about the viewer.
- docTrackr – docTrackr helps businesses keep their documents under control, regardless of where they are stored or with whom they are shared. docTrackr enables a user to remotely destroy or update their documents, and provides real-time information on what people are doing with your documents. docTrackr.com is a SaaS based platform providing file security on demand for enterprises and cloud platforms such as Box.com.
- FLASHiZ -FLASHiZ is a quick and easy-to-use universal smartphone payment service that allows users to make in-store and online payments, peer-to-peer transfers, and provide invoices. FLASHiZ’s clients include franchises, banks, stores, and equipment manufacturers.
- Followapps – Followapps provides brands with a SaaS platform to launch, measure, optimize, and maintain their presence and grow their audience in the mobile world. This platform provides guidance to implement a successful mobile strategy, and recommends step-by-step actions to guarantee consistency across all the apps.
- iQsim – The iQsim Mobile Robot and its associated innovative remote SIM technology provide mobile operators with a highly scalable and open solution for building their own 3G/4G platform testing. Using this robot, operators can simulate traffic (IP, video streaming, Voice Over LTE, M2M) on their network and ultimately understand how the new network will behave.
- Kalistick – Kalistick offers a unique “Test Coverage Intelligence” technology as a hybrid on-premise/cloud platform that provides development teams with key data to improve testing effectiveness. Using Kalistick, development teams reduce their testing efforts by 30% while increasing their software quality by 50%.
- Kpsule – Kpsule is a SaaS platform that allows rich media campaign delivery within just 24 hours, easily disseminated and targeted to the most powerful web audiences. Kpsule offers unmatched performance – 3 to 5% engagement rates with up to 50% agreement rates.
- Leankr – RedBox, created by Leankr, is a unique search engine-like second screen platform that uses the Web to gather only the most relevant content, and then pushes and synchronizes it with the TV programs in real-time. Leankr’s clients include television networks, and Tier-1 operators and broadcasters.
- Squid Solutions – Squid Solutions offers a SaaS Data Management Platform for brands to collect, store and manage all information related to interactions with consumers online reducing set-up time and big data management overhead, while increasing efficiency and knowledge. Using Squid’s DMP, digital marketing managers and their agencies can create cookie pools (segments) that are synched with Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) to buy media space and place personalized ads.
- SunPartner – SunPartner developed a range of ultra-thin, transparent optic and photovoltaic components that increase the energy autonomy of screened devices and flat surfaces used in daily life by 20-100%.
- Sush.io – Sush.io provides startups and mid-sized companies with a tailored business intelligence tool aimed at reducing paperwork and Excel spreadsheet usage. Its platform automatically aggregates and organizes data from 300+ Online accounts such as Paypal, T-Mobile, Github, Recurly, Mailchimp, Google adwords on a clear and well-designed dashboard.
- tinyclues – tinyclues is a cloud-based predictive marketing SaaS platform that delivers immediate and provable impact. tinyclues outperforms competing solutions by a margin of 25% to 40% in live A/B testing run by its clients.
- Wimi – Wimi is a cloud-based platform for small and mid-sized companies and entrepreneurs that simplifies file sharing and project management. Additionally, Wimi synchronizes professional data (files, calendars, tasks, contacts) across team members, according to their role. It is a professional, user-friendly and secure alternative to Dropbox.
- Xilopix – Xilopix has developed a search engine and digital asset management solution featuring automatic indexing, annotation, and image content recognition. It provides a way to search, manage and find multimedia content intuitively by using your fingertips.