I had the pleasure to welcome and organize last week the visit to Seattle of a delegation of 19 people from Nantes. Their program was pretty full every day. Have a look at it below:

MONDAY
Visit at Microsoft
Meeting with French IT company Adeneo Corporation and its rep Yannick Chammings.

TUESDAY
Presentation and meeting with Michael Killoren, Director of the Mayor’s Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs for the City of Seattle about creative industries

Visits of several art galleries and lofts

WEDNESDAY
Presentation given by Bill Stafford from the Trade Development Alliance of Greater Seattle giving an overview of the local economic situation
Presenation of the French presence in WA State by Jack A. Cowan, executive director of the FACCPNW
Overview of the High Tech industry given by Karl da Gama Campos
and finally a presentation given by Steve Garritson about the Clean Tech technology.

The presentation session was followed by a visit at the Washington Technology Alliance and a tour of the labs, followed by a meeting and tour at the Washington Convention and Trade Center and Visitors Bureau. We were welcomed by Brad Jones and Michael.

THURSDAY
The day was focused on biotechnologies:
Presentation about the biotechnologies in Washington States by Lee Huntsman, executive director of the Life Sciences Discovery Fund and very famous in the region; followed by a speech given by David Schubert, who works at Accelerator Corp, an investment and development company based in WA.

Visit of the Institute of System Biology where we were honored to be received by Leroy Hood, founder and CEO of ISB and Accelerator Corp.

Meeting with Vulcan Inc. about the South Lake Union Project followed by a visit of facilities of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

Presentation of the biotech industry in France and introduction to Atlanpole Cluster given by Georges Igor Chargardieff, biotech attaché at UBIFRANCE in San Francisco and Olivier Kitten, responsible for the biotech sector at Atlanpole (Nantes). Both presentations were followed by a networking evening where people from many different spheres have had a chance to talk to each other and have fun.

FRIDAY
Visit of The Boeing Company plant in Everett before going to the Sea Tac airport.

Everywhere we went, we all had the pleasure to be very welcome and many times by francophones.
The group was also of a great quality, curious, interested, motivated.

I really appreciated being their guide throughout the week. The week was so busy that I even feel a bit lonely now!

Below are a few pictures. More are to be found under the pictures and video gallery tab.

The new fundraiser for the French-American Chamber of Commerce, Soirée Prestige, was held yesterday Saturday, June 7 with a great turnout: 103 guests.
The evening went very well featuring good ambiance, glass of Champagne, good food and wine, live music and dancing in a unusually beautiful venue: The Sunset Club.
The first feedbacks that we had yesterday were all be very positive and I am very glad about it. We put a lot of energy and work to make this elegant gala special to the attendees and I believe we did it!

Pictures will come very soon and you’ll see how everything looked beautiful!

Thank you for everyone who helped make this event a success. Our sponsors Safran Group and Dassault Systemes, Sephora, WJ Deutsch & Sons, Pierre Sparr. Our supporters who bid on auction items. Our guests who made the evening so special.

Watch a documentary about Seattle’s Sister City: Nantes, France broadcasted by Channel 21 Seattle on 5/30/2008.
On this episode of the SEATTLE CHANNEL’s Sister Cities documentary series, producer Susan Han visits Seattle’s Sister City of Nantes, France on the estuary of the Loire River near the Atlantic coast. Nantes is France’s 6th largest city, with a growing population of more than a half-million, and much in common with her Pacific Northwest sister.

Learn more about Seattle-Nantes relation and watch what is being done in Seattle for the Bastille Day Celebration (filmed in 2007). Link: http://www.seattlechannel.org/videos/video.asp?ID=4050752

Seattle’s French Underground: Thousands have invaded metro Puget Sound, many of them in search of opportunities and attitudes in technology that simply don’t exist at home in France. Part 1

By Cynthia Rose

Springtime in Paris? You might think, even if you’re just browsing Walgreen’s at Second Avenue and Pike Street in downtown Seattle. You hear a breathy “Je les adore!” A peek around your aisle reveals two young, soignée black women, stuffing their shopping baskets full of Pepperidge Farm cookies. A careful “D’où venez vous?” receives a cordial response. “Why, we’re from Paris …” How do they find Seattle? A little chilly but quite charming. The Market! The seafood! The water! All so bio.  

Bio is the modish French term for green and organic.  

You can have a similar conversation several times a day, as easily in Renton’s Ikea or a Bellevue sushi bar as any tourist hot spot. Especially if you frequent farmers markets or quiet wine bars, it can be surprising how many times a day you hear French speakers – often being surprised by one another’s presence. 

In two years, the French population of metro Puget Sound has exploded. According to Laure-Alessia Leroy, the young deputy director at the French-American Chamber of Commerce (FACC), our region is now home to 6,000 French nationals. Since not everyone needs to register with the consular agency, this is a minimum estimate. 

Leroy, whose actual employer is the French government’s Finance Ministry, is also a trade attaché, dealing with 80 local companies and more in development. “I was assigned,” she says, “because there is so much going on here for French people. Every year, the FACC has an increase of 25 percent.” 

In 2007, according to the French Foreign Ministry, almost 4 percent of the country’s population emigrated and almost half of those who left were under 35. U.S. pundits like to present the numbers as a “brain drain,” a flight of talent thwarted by home’s strict bureaucracy. However, in the context of the whole European Union, “French flight” looks far less singular (a British national, for example, emigrates every three minutes). Five months of exploring our new French underground almost tempts me to side with conservative daily Le Figaro, which proclaims a new “French conquest of the world.” 

For one thing, as Leroy notes, “French people, they stay French. Wherever they go, they remain French. Now it’s not just that you’re coming to work for an American business, no, no, no! It often leads to something more for France and for French business.” 

Absolutely, says Yannick Chamming’s. Chamming’s is CEO of Bellevue’s Adeneo, a satellite he created in 2007 for his French company, Adetel. The key for Chamming’s was leveraging his expertise in Windows Embedded CE development. “I started doing Windows CE work 10 years ago, so I was probably one of the first persons in France to work with it. In 2002, I joined Adetel to help them with it and, by 2004, we were a gold partner of Microsoft.” 

Seeing the value in an office closer to headquarters, Chamming’s set off for Redmond, accompanied by one engineer. By last year’s end, Adeneo had nine employees, four of whom are French and, today, they are still hiring. 

Their founder, who grew up in Lyon, says he discovered much he never expected. “I like Brittany and I like Ireland and, with my feelings, I find so much natural beauty! This is also the first place in America I have seen people walking.”
Business-wise, adds Chamming’s, “There is really the pioneer spirit. Before 1990, Seattle had very few things. Now, you have these histories of people having one good idea – or at least a timely one – then creating something that becomes truly global.” For him, that is the point. “I can come here, make something from nothing and, when I return to France, my position in my own company will be much different. If I had just stayed there, I don’t think this would be possible.”

Although the French job market remains problematic, unemployment in mainland France has decreased — at the end of 2007, it was the lowest seen for 10 years. Nevertheless, work remains standardized and well protected. To found a company, employers must pay social security, pension, and unemployment contributions equal to almost 48 percent of every employee’s salary. Says Chamming’s: “There, it’s not at all simple, you have a constant stream of requirements.” Just as business abroad offers a way around such issues, it has also emerged as a “fast track” to promotion or change. 

Benoît Vialle is a senior planner in Mobile Communications at Microsoft. He is also a graduate of a French “grand école”: one of 500 or so deliberately elite institutions whose diplomas guarantee lifelong employment. But Vialle, who started work in management at Bouygues Telecom, craved a wider vision. He also saw the system’s faults through his wife’s experience – although Gaëlle Vialle holds multiple degrees in mathematics, finance, and business law, they are from French universities, rather than grand écoles. (Here, at Microsoft, she has become the senior program manager for Xbox Live). 

“In our system,” says Vialle, “you must choose a path early on, then you work like crazy and you follow only that path. Psychologically tough or highly gifted students may excel, but more independent, sensitive personalities may not thrive. The system puts them on alternative paths that are not as prestigious – like going to university versus a grande école. The handicaps this can create may follow you throughout a career.”

One of five children from a military family, Vialle sought his MBA at Northwestern University. He was then snapped up to work for Microsoft in Chicago. When the Vialles relocated to Seattle six years ago, Benoît says, they mourned the loss of “Chicago’s culture: all the theater, the cinema, the opera, the art. But we have three kids and, for family life, this is a great place.” 

For instance, here they discovered the Montessori teaching system. “Which is really great for our children. They are discovering and cultivating their strengths, rather than constantly being corrected. Plus we send them back to France every summer, for the language and the culture and to reconnect with family.” 

 Read other series at: http://crosscut.com/culture-ethnicity/13956/

Next: Professional and social cultural differences are a mixed bag.

• Cynthia Rose is a journalist and broadcaster based in London and Seattle. You can reach her in care of editor@crosscut.com.

Le Networking is designed for women who wish to meet other women and make business connections.
Last Thursday, April 24, the meeting featured Carolyn Ferguson, owner and chef of Belle Epicurean, a bakery situated inside the Fairmont Hotel downtown Seattle. Carolyn spent a few years in France studying at Cordon Bleu. She explained how she got started in Chicago with her husband, what the next strategy development for the bakery will be and her challenges as wife and mother.
The meeting started at 7:30AM until 9:00AM. As usual: very good connections for everyone, good ambiance (even though very early), and very nice breakfast (from Belle Epicurean of course!).

This kind of meeting will be developped when more speakers are proposed to us.
We witness a real interest for those American and French women to get together for the same reason: their love for France and the curiosity to learn more about other people’s experiences, professionnal as well as private challenges involved in their choices.

Next Le Networking will come back in September as the team is currently focused on the success of its new fundraising gala: Soirée Prestige (June 7 at the Sunset Club - private Club on First Hill. Calendar of events at www.faccpnw.org)

Thank you to Betty Frost, Board member of the FACCPNW and VP Program, for organizing it.

SeaBear acquires Gerard & Dominque Seafoods

Puget Sound Business Journal (Seattle)

SeaBear Co. has bought competitor GD Seafoods for an undisclosed price.

Anacortes-based SeaBear sells smoked salmon and specialty seafood. GD, which does business as Gerard & Dominique, is based in Woodinville and sells high-end salmon products.

SeaBear also operates Made in Washington stores, which sell gifts from around the state. Gerard & Dominque was co-owned by Dominique Place and his wife, ChouChou, and both will remain with the company.

G&D was founded by Place and fellow chef Gerard Parrat in 1990; Parrat retired 10 years ago.

&D are members of the French-American Chamber of Commerce.

The New York Times

April 15, 2008

Abroad

A Lowbrow in High Office Ruffles France

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

PARIS — Nearly a year into his term President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has hardly mentioned the arts or culture. In late February he said that French cuisine should be added to the Unesco World Heritage list.

De Gaulle had André Malraux at his elbow. François Mitterrand renovated the Louvre. Just before he left office, Jacques Chirac opened an immense museum for non-Western cultures, designed by Jean Nouvel, which in its confusing, heart-of-darkness, overwrought layout epitomizes a certain kind of French arrogance and architectural megalomania. Naturally, millions of tourists now flock to it.

Every French president since the liberation has cooked up some such pharaonic new museum or opera house or library or initiated some legacy-minded cultural program, until now. Mr. Sarkozy’s taste is said to be for Lionel Ritchie and Celine Dion. (Mitterrand mulled over Dostoyevsky; de Gaulle consumed Chateaubriand.) The current president’s fondness for showbiz pals, his marriage to the Italian model-turned-singer Carla Bruni and the appointment of a culture minister, Christine Albanel, who is intelligent but widely regarded as weak among Mr. Sarkozy’s ministers, have combined to produce something of a culture shock.

“A rupture,” is what the political scientist Pascal Perrineau calls it.

“An incredible change,” said Jean Lacouture, de Gaulle’s biographer. One recent afternoon he sat in his study overlooking the Seine, meditating on this turn of events. “When de Gaulle returned to a liberated France in 1944,” he recalled, “he made a show of visiting famous writers like Paul Valéry and François Mauriac. It was his way of declaring a renewed sense of French glory.”

These days Paris kiosks advertise copies of a special issue of Le Canard Enchaîné, the satirical newspaper, with yet another photograph of Mr. Sarkozy in his familiar aviator Ray-Bans, a yacht and a private jet superimposed onto his two mirrored lenses. “President Bling-Bling” has already become a cliché.

“Sarko l’Américain” is another common insult. The French, though, may soon have to think up a fresh one if (and you can almost hear Mitterrand starting to turn in his grave) the United States elects a president who delivers speeches like the one Senator Barack Obama gave on race while this country has its first modern leader not to have graduated from the country’s upper-crust schools, a head of state who on a recent visit to the Vatican arrived late, with an exceptionally crude French stand-up comic named Jean-Marie Bigard in tow. The coup de grâce: the hyperactive Mr. Sarkozy reportedly text-messaged somebody or other while with the pope.

That incident infuriated some French Roman Catholics along with many stodgy Gaullists and other traditional French conservatives who, though they helped elect him, now find Mr. Sarkozy, to put it bluntly, vulgar.

“His acquaintance with television and media people, with stars, the way he behaves, all this is an annoyance for the right,” Hervé Mariton acknowledged. He is a young, worldly, neo-Gaullist member of Mr. Sarkozy’s ruling center-right Union for a Popular Movement in Parliament. He stopped briefly to talk at a busy cafe across from the National Assembly and admitted that he had not been the president’s most ardent admirer.

“Our president may not be exceptionally cultivated, but he’s also not a stupid man,” Mr. Mariton offered. “He wants to prove to a part of the elite that things have changed. Like other aspects of government, our cultural policy had become incestuous. So for the president to create a certain distance from it can be good.”

“Ignorance is not,” he added before saying that he had to dash back to the Parliament.

Patrick Rambaud is not so diplomatic. His satiric novel “The Chronicle of the Reign of Nicolas the First” has become a best seller here. An old-style French leftist rooted in the ethos of 1968, he was visiting his Left Bank publisher’s office the other morning. The making-fun-of-Sarkozy business has brought him a surprising windfall.

“We are all ashamed,” he said, about the president’s lack of interest in culture and his general bucks-and-babes style. “I mean, taking Bigard to the pope. Even as a writer I couldn’t have invented that.” (Truth be told, he sounded more grateful than angry.) Mr. Rambaud recalled the sophistication of earlier presidents. Mr. Sarkozy has almost inspired in him a nostalgia for de Gaulle.

“Look, we need a president who is cultivated,” he said, as if for a Frenchman this were as indisputable as the superiority of Pétrus. “It goes back to the days of the kings.”

Georges Pompidou published an anthology of French poetry and conceived the national center for modern art named after him. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing left behind the Orsay museum. Mr. Chirac, to enhance his aura (in the United States this would be political suicide of course), spread word while president that he had translated Pushkin as a teenager. And aside from the Louvre, Mitterrand’s grands travaux included the new Bastille Opera and the new National Library. They may be calamitous, much-loathed buildings (“the answer to a question no one asked,” Hugues Gall, the former director of the Bastille, often joked about his opera house). But under Mr. Mitterrand and his powerful culture minister, Jack Lang, culture rose to something like a state religion in France.

Now, the endless flow (much of which he himself eagerly sought) of paparazzi photographs, Internet chatter and “news” about Mr. Sarkozy and Ms. Bruni — she, dressed like Jacqueline Kennedy in a pillbox hat while visiting Britain, or not dressed at all; they on a date at Euro Disney or vacationing in Luxor, Egypt, while the French economy swooned — has kept the president’s approval numbers low. And lately it has led his increasingly panicked advisers to try to retool him as a tad more circumspect.

The day he said French food should be protected by Unesco, he raised eyebrows by rudely insulting a Frenchman who declined to shake his hand. Now he gravely attends military funerals and christens nuclear submarines.

Not that French people are buying it. The latest poll, in L’Express, the French newsmagazine, has 45 percent saying his style hasn’t changed at all; 22 percent, that it’s worse. The issue is clearly cultural. His prime minister, who carries out the president’s economic plans, is very popular.

“I’m banking on Carla,” Mr. Lacouture, the de Gaulle biographer, said. “France has had many brilliant queens, you know.”

It turns out, this is what many French people have begun to tell themselves. Olivier Py, the director of the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe in Paris, one of France’s five national theaters, also speculated the other morning that Ms. Bruni and her sister, a filmmaker and actress, might make a kind of project of the president, culturally speaking: Pygmalions to his Galatea.

Even if not, Mr. Py said: “Sarkozy’s personal idea of culture doesn’t really matter. The point is, he needs to take up the idea that French culture matters. Nobody is doing that any longer on the left or right. It’s shocking. In France this is the role of the president. He can’t continue to be silent.”

Small cuts to the national theater’s state budget (about 5 percent, Mr. Py estimated), while understandable in a shrinking economy, have nonetheless hurt, he said. “This is a country that knows it can’t afford to go on as things are, but we enjoy a good life here.” Mr. Py shrugged. “Nobody wants to give that up.”

Unlike some artists Mr. Py is not so worried that the president will make far more devastating cuts to culture. (“We won’t let him,” he simply said.) But he does fret that, absent Mr. Sarkozy’s greater commitment, the country may lose its grip on the notion of the arts as a national duty, not just a luxury.

Didier Bezace agrees. An actor, since 1997 he has directed the Théâtre de la Commune in Aubervilliers, producing plays in one of Paris’s poor immigrant suburbs. “In these difficult places especially we need cultural institutions to show that we won’t give up,” he said. “Sarkozy has been the greatest enemy to the suburbs not because he said the people there were ‘scum’ ” — he said that during the rioting that broke out before he became president — “but because everything about him reinforces the idea among the French urban poor that the goal is a fat wallet, brand-name clothes, big hotels and cars.”

Mr. Perrineau, the political scientist, put it differently: “With his jeans, his rudeness, his crude language, no tie, he establishes a new iconography for France. Casualness translates into a more secular sort of leadership, which is why people who don’t like him here talk about the Americanization of France. For both the left and right this means anti-intellectual.”

Campaigning for culture might help remedy that. As Chateaubriand put it, “Taste is the good sense of genius.”

I was very pleased to hear that the American marketing compagnie Modo Group, whose main client is Microsoft, is planning to open an office in Paris by June 2008.
Following a meeting with our member Philippe Sanchez, who volunteered to be our speaker at our first NetwWine event (cf article), who told us about the project, we put Modo Group in contact with my co-worker Arnaud Filhue, from the Invest in France Agency.

We also get a call from Greg Lamm, journalist at the Puget Sound Business Journal, who interviewed us about the increasing number of French companies visiting the Puget Sound region since Air France opening its direct flight.

The IFA is a governmental agency helping worldwide companies to set up their businesses in France. It helps them by offering them many advantages (one of them: tax deductions) that they would otherwise never been aware of.

We wish the best to Modo Group with their project in France and hope that many other companies will follow their example.
France is not any more the country that the people used to think it was. Despite problems remaining like in many countries, it is becoming very competitive and attractive for foreign businesses.

Here is the link to the article http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/stories/2008/04/07/story9.html

Other press articles concerning our members: http://www.faccpnw.org/index.php?id=4685

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Seattle marketer spans ocean with Paris office

Puget Sound Business Journal (Seattle) - by Greg Lamm and Steve Wilhelm Staff Writer

Modo Group, a small Seattle marketing and branding company that counts Microsoft as one of its major clients, is opening an office in Paris to be near the software giant’s European, Middle Eastern and African headquarters.

The move to Paris this June will put Modo closer to the action with Microsoft’s Paris-based operations and also will give the boutique branding firm a foothold in Europe to attract new business, said Modo Managing Partner George Murphy.

Modo’s decision shows how issues such as currency exchange rates and more convenient travel options can affect the strategy of a small company with clients in foreign markets. Murphy said the weak U.S. dollar against the euro should make Modo’s fees more attractive to European companies. And Modo’s decision to go to Paris was helped along by non-stop service between Seattle and the French capital that Air France launched last year, Murphy said.

“It makes things a whole lot easier because of the direct flights,” said Murphy, a former branding executive with Starbucks and Coca-Cola who relaunched Modo last year.

Mr. Jean-Pierre Leroy, private forest manager (Expert forestier) for 30 years in the South East of France (Burgundy, Rhône Alpes Region) is launching his new professional blog: http://leroyjpexpert.wordpress.com.