My friend Brian Boyer at Perkins Coie alerted me to the next French Connection/Tech Connection meeting on March 19th. Four startups will demo at L'Atelier BNP-Paribas in San Francisco.

GrandCentral was founded by former DialPad and Yahoo execs Vincent Paquet and Craig Walker. Their value proposition is very simple: "One phone tied to you, not your location, ...for life". Criteo is a Web 2.0 collaborative recommendation engine for merchants and portals based in Paris and SF, backed by French VCs. As you surf the web, privately funded and Paris-based Yoono lets you effortlessly discover similar sites, blog notes and people sharing the same interests based on community rankings. Djingle, also Paris-based, offers a platform for low-cost, high quality TV and Video On Demand.

Graspr* was recently founded by Teresa Phillips, ex VP Business Operations at Yahoo is still in stealth mode. Think of it as a (broad) vertical video web play. For more info contact her at tap graspr [dot] com.

Ephox* is a revenue stage startup seeking bridge and series A funds to accelerate product development and scale its customer base. The company makes productivity software for wikis, blogs and content management systems (CMS). Their first product is EditLive, an online tool for business users creating web content that offers the most robust features, customizability, extensibility,and seamless integration with popular enterprise CMS software.

Red Condor* is another revenue stage startup seeking bridge and series B funds to deliver an extended product offering to its target markets. Using the industry's first “hybrid” perimeter-based security appliance, Red Condor delivers on-demand, high performance, easy-to-use network management and security products, continuously updated to defeat the latest Internet threats. Supported by 24x7 technical support, Red Condor network security solutions dramatically reduce the administrative burden of network security.

Nomadrive *, in alpha stage, has built patent pending application virtualization software which enables users to carry any application on a portable storage device such as USB Flash key or USB disk drive and run from it without having to install. Their solution enables the user to carry and run all applications on any computer without administrative privileges, allowing the user to use public computer at airports, internet café or hotels. They already have a number of high profile angel investors and are finishing their bridge round.

TutorOwl * is a revenue stage company that wants to grow in the field of offshored, real-time, 1 on 1 tutoring, taking advantage of the growing market for individualized, quality, lower-cost tutoring as well as the resources afforded by the No Child Left Behind initiative.

Zortal * is rapidly emerging as the leader in the lucrative market for youth sports league management and registrations (and associated e-commerce). Ever stood in line to register your kids? Ever had to phone umpteen other parents to figure out where the new venue is or whether the game has been cancelled...No more... At revenue stage and inciting quite a bit of interest. (Disclaimer: I am an advisor and investor) .

UtilIT has developed an automated virtual IT infrastructure for small and mid size enterprises allowing users to subscribe to applications (Microsoft Office 2007, Adobe Acrobat Professional, QuickBooks, etc.) and IT features (data storage, protections, back up, hosted Exchange email, Hosted BlackBerry, Treo, Windows Mobile) all via the Internet. The company has over 1,300 end users and partnerships with Microsoft, Citrix, HP, Salesforce.com and others. CEO Chris Boone asserts that his fully maintained SaaS platform is gathering interest from large and small enterprises, ISPs, hosting companies and ISVs alike.

Convergent Mobile Devices is still in semi-stealth mode. Their new products MobiTags (interactive print advertising 2-D tags for camera phones) and MobiZones (not yet released as of this date) are aimed at the burgeoning market for mobile advertising. This may be a slight morphing for CMD, which previously was only focused on MobiPlay,a technology that claims to give users true portability of their content. (For example users could play full size videos on their mobile phones off smart flash drives)

Rallypoint was formed by Rocket Ventures' Jeff Allen and David Adams to deliver to your TV every form of Internet content (multiple scores, chat, IM, photos, videos, traffic...) you would ever want to see on your big screen (while watching the Raiders lose...) They plan to bypass cable providers and use multiple platforms including IPTV set-top boxes and new Internet enabled TV sets. Alpha stage.

Geospot's CEO Joe Chen has so many ideas for applying his technology ("LBS for the rest of us") that his vision seems at times a bit unfocused. For both end-users and e-businesses, his new-generation web based vector map engine and vector-tile streaming promises the most interactive maps and deepest individual and community overlays yet, with multi-language capabilities, annotations, wikis, highlights, real time publishing,tracking and interaction. In alpha now, in beta soon.

Apptus* works off the salesforce.com platform (50,000 customers by year-end) and offers on-demand Contract Management Solutions to automate the entire contract lifecycle and related process. Kirk Krappe describes his product as high-functionality, low-cost, up-in-a-day and has customers to prove it. The higher end of the market has seen a lot of activity due to SOX, aka the Perpetual CPA Employment Act, but as Kirk puts it, formalizing and managing contracts is a necessary step of every company's sales process.

Byteshield's * Veteran CEO Jan Samzelius learned from crackers and created a product that solves the problem of software piracy by "making it near impossible and certainly impractical to steal software, while completely safe and transparent for the user." The company's multiple protection steps allows publishers to mass distribute full feature trial versions with full control over use. Byteshield has signed its first customers.

DMD Mobile is the leading provider of mobile technology and mobile media for the off-deck consumer wireless market in North America. The company, launched in 2004, is at revenue stage.

Younite* has developed a distributed information exchange model where the server is not the data store for personal information. Organizations can connect to Younite's personal information exchange and still keep their customer data where it belongs…. on their systems. End-users too can keep their personal information and their address book on their computers.

PlantSense* has developed a consumer micro-climate probe that connects to the PlantSense web site and helps consumers grow healthy indoor and outdoor plants. Their product is simple and fun and delivers both plant diagnosis and recommendation. They are distributing their product both through retailers and specialty catalogs and web sites.

Fonjax* is still in stealth mode. Suffice it to say that they plan to dramatically improve the quality control and deployment of mobile applications.

Opelin's* Titanize product transforms content management by establishing a virtually permanent connection between files on the PC and files on the internet, allowing the consolidation of five usually separate services — protect, access, synch, share, and publish — into a single online product. Titanize is distributed by McAffee and powers McAfee's local back-up and archiving.

Xilas Medical sells patented medical devices, which are founded on evidence-based medicine and are clinically proven to reduce foot ulcers and amputations in diabetic patients.