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> Multicity's CEO & President Interviewed on CNNfn
Title: Multicity.com's CEO & President Interviewed on
CNNfn: Digital Jam
Author:
Source: CNNfn: Digital Jam
June 19, 2000

BRUCE FRANCIS, CNNfn ANCHOR, DIGITAL JAM: Ever wanted to impress your friends by speaking other languages? Well, now you can.

MARY KATHLEEN FLYNN, CNNfn ANCHOR, DIGITAL JAM: There's a new chat site that translates your writing into 18 different languages. The site is Multicity and here with us now to show us how it works are president Patrick Hanash and CEO Alain Hanash. Now this is Patrick. Nope, this is Alain. This is Alain. This is Patrick. All right, great. Tell us how this works.

ALAIN HANASH, CEO, MULTICITY: Well the idea behind Multicity is really to try to break down the language barriers that exist on the Internet. In a couple of years, you'll have more non-English speakers on the Internet than actual English speakers. So we wanted to develop something that will allow people with different language skills to actually be able to communicate. The way it works is you can join a chat room on any topic on our vast network on Multicity.com and eventually talk in your native language. However, other people participating in the same chat room will see it in their native language, on the fly, in real time. So if you say hello, the Frenchman will see bon jour and the Italian will see it in another language.

FRANCIS: Now, anyone who's tried their hand at translating knows that some things just don't do very well and also chat room conversations tend to be kind of loose and have a lot of colloquial terms.

FLYNN: And slang.

FRANCIS: Exactly. Patrick, tell me how you deal with those things.

PATRICK HANASH, PRESIDENT, MULTICITY: Well, what we're trying to do with our technology, with our instant translating technology is facilitate communication between people of different languages. So it's not the question of solving the language barrier. I think it's a question of enabling people to communicate and getting the gist of what people are saying. Now the applications are very diverse. People can use that technology to learn new languages but we've been approached already by companies interested in using that technology for global customer support, for example, where they can be sitting in Texas and enabling customer support to their products across the world using that technology.

ALAIN HANASH: And to just add to this, it's true that the translations are never perfect. Languages are the most imperfect science out there. It's very difficult to have perfect translation. However, I think we at Multicity.com have at least lowered the barrier so that people that would have never understood each other in a chat room, can now communicate and participate in a conversation.

FLYNN: And Alain, where are you getting that technology from? I mean have you written all these different translation programs or have you bought it from somebody?

ALAIN HANASH: Well, we've developed all the communication aspect of it and then we worked with a company called SYSTRAN on some of the languages, but we will be adding a lot of different language combinations in the upcoming future with other companies' translation engines.

FRANCIS: Quickly, what's the business model behind this? How do you make your money?

PATRICK HANASH: The way we make our money, first of all we distribute our communications tools for free and it's based on ad revenue share, ad banner share. That's the first revenue model. The second model is licensing. We do license our technology to companies and organizations. For example, we license our chat rooms to Trimark Pictures and the United Nations. Red Hot Chili Pepper uses our technology and we license it.

FLYNN: Alain, how are people using the chat rooms, briefly?

ALAIN HANASH: They're using it in every aspect you can imagine. They're using it to learn new languages. They're using it to meet new people. They're using it to find answers on homework, especially the translation portion of it. It's unbelievable what people have been able to do with this translation mechanism that we`ve put in place.

FLYNN: All right, well best of luck and thanks for joining us, Alain and Patrick Hanash from Multicity.

Content and programming copyright 2000 Cable News Network, Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Prepared by eMediaMillWorks, Inc. (f/k/a Federal Document Clearing House, Inc.) No license is granted to the user of this material other than for research. User may not reproduce or redistribute the material except for user's personal or internal use and, in such case, only one copy may be printed, nor shall user use any material for commercial purposes or in any fashion that may infringe upon Cable News Network, Inc.'s copyright or other proprietary rights or interests in the material; provided, however, that members of the news media may redistribute limited portions (less than 250 words) of this material without a specific license from CNN so long as they provide conspicuous attribution to CNN as the originator and copyright holder of such material. This is not a legal transcript for purposes of litigation.

(c) Copyright Federal Document Clearing House. All Rights Reserved.

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