REUTERS WASHINGTON, D.C., March 8 -- Brothers Alain and Patrick Hanesh, who are of French-Lebanese background, wanted to set up a Web service two years ago that would break down cultural and language barriers around the world.

IN ROLLING OUT Multicity.com, they may have come up with a new business model that, in effect, turns a Web portal inside out and vastly increases its global scope.

At first glance, the company's Web site seems like an unattractive channel for chat, bulletin boards and instant messaging. Part of that is purposeful.

"People go onto our Web site, and they see another chat company, and we want them to think that -- for now," says Alain, who serves as CEO. "We didn't want to show all our cards. But if you look really deep under the skin of that Web site, you will find a huge network covering at least 70 different countries."

That network comprises various local Web sites around the world. Plugging in MultiCity's applications, they are linked to the company as well to each other.

When the two formed Multicity, they hoped to come up with a way to increase communication between people in various countries.

Alain, 29, is the technologist. He had worked on a streaming sound and video tool at Cornell University in 1995 and coded Multicity.com's products himself.

Patrick, 32, has an MBA. He wrote the business plan and designed the company's first Web site.

Born in the United States, where their father was a visiting physician, they moved back to France for high school. Then they returned to the United States for college and stayed.

"When you live in Europe you feel close to the rest of the world -- you really feel connected --but in the United States we were more secluded," says Patrick, who is president and CFO of Multicity.

The answer, they felt, was a product that could bridge that divide. The first step was rolling out a chat program that other Web sites could use.

FORGING THE CONNECTION

The Multicity chats function as if they were hosted on the individual sites but actually all reside on Multicity.com's servers.

"Essentially we control about 50-60 percent of the page and the Web site controls the rest," Patrick explains. That allows for co-branding.

The program, offered for free in March 1999, immediately took off. Although it was first offered in English, the two rolled out versions in 20 languages.

Soon they added a bulletin board service for Web sites, then a matching service so users could find people with similar interests on the global network. Last week they launched an instant messaging service.

They now have 50,000 active Web sites (100,000 registered ones) and more than 115,000 unique users a day who spend an average of 30 minutes a session online.

All this was achieved without spending a penny -- or yen or franc, for that matter -- on marketing.

Their next application will be to translate chat in real time so that French speaking users could, for example, communicate with Americans without knowing English.

Although they first aimed at raising a few hundred thousand dollars from angel investors, they revised that goal as the service took off and went for venture capital.

At first it was hard to get attention -- they sent out more than 100 business plans without a reply -- but eventually they won a meeting with Draper Atlantic in August 1999 and got an offer for $1 million in 30 minutes.

"They had customers. We like that," says Jim Lynch, managing partner with Draper Atlantic. He also liked that the network grew by word of mouth, reached a global market and did so with communication applications.

They took the $1 million and raised $15 million more in a second round led by Grotech Capital Group last month.

COMMUNICATION OR COMMERCE?

Multicity functions like a mini-World Wide Web. Visitors can move from one Multicity-partner site to another with a simple click, and all the content is controlled by the local sites.

Sitting in on a chat with a fisherman in Western Australia, a user can call up a list of other active chats and jump to one in southern India and then to another in Wales or Italy. Like many early Internet services, the current discussions in the Multicity chart rooms seem to focus on sex and relationships, though that was true of America Online as well.

Multicity must decide how it wants to expand and leverage its network.

Patrick, for instance, called up a software demo on his laptop that beamed a video clip across the top portion of a chat room page. The same could be done for music and other content, tailored to the local site or part of a global media campaign.

"Imagine the power for Sony to play a song all over the world, with one click of a button," Alain says. "Instead of going to different markets, they come to us, we send it over the network, let people listen to it, buy it and download it."

The risk, of course, is that too much control from the center might alienate users at the local site, subverting what the network is all about.

Still, the model is enticing, especially compared with portals. What these centralized sites have done is aggregate viewers, offering a wealth of content at a branded site.

But in many markets -- especially undeveloped ones -- the Web is a free-for-all where the brands aren't as powerful, and local, specialized sites rule.

Here, the Hanesh brothers argue, it's easier to aggregate users where they are rather than convince them to go somewhere else.

"And once you have the eyeballs and the ears, it's very simple to commercialize," Alain adds.

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