The following is an excerpt on Multicity:

…In 1999, brothers Alain and Patrick Hanash, after months of research and experimentation in a makeshift basement office in their parents' home, devised an idea for an enterprise that within 2 years attracted $16 million in funding. The vision they shared, which they named Multicity (www.multicity.com), was based in two globalizing realizations:

• More than 52 percent of the earth's Internet users are non-English-speaking.
• By the year 2003, $913 billion in e-commerce revenue will be derived outside the United States-two-thirds of all global revenues.

The Hanash brothers married this worldview to an application service provider (ASP) model using technology that allows them to sell software and tools directly to Web sites, bypassing portals altogether. In essence, each participating Web site becomes a portal. This means that Multicity's users are able to contact users on any other sites that similarly use its tools and thus create the first multilingual open global network for communications tools.

Today, Multicity's products include instant translation-enabled chat rooms (available in 17 languages), message boards, instant messaging (also with instant translation), auctions, and Web polls. Because some 80 percent of U.S. companies currently transact business online in English only, Alain and Patrick Hanash have good reason to believe they're on to something. Further confirmation of their optimism was an award to Multicity from Yahoo! Internet Life magazine for "Best Chat" of 2001.…

Copyright © 2002 by Robert F. Wilson. All rights reserved.