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Virginia Governor James Gilmore's Visit
Title: Virginia Governor
James Gilmore's Visit to Multicity.com Featured on Washington, DC's
WRC-TV (NBC) News
Author: Multicity Defies
Dot-Com Shakeout with Sound Business Model
Source: Washington,
DC's WRC-TV (NBC) News
May 17, 2001
Pat Lawson Muse, co-anchor: In the midst of the big shakeout in the
.com industry, it may be news to a lot of folks that there are so
many success stories. Governor Jim Gilmore came to Northern Virginia
today to visit some of them and offer some optimism about the future
of Internet entrepreneurship. News Four's Doug McKelway is in our
newsroom to tell us about Gilmore's trip to the area.
Doug McKelway: Governor Gilmore came to Northern Virginia today
amidst a climate of layoffs and pessimism in parts of the high tech
industry to paint a much rosier picture than what many of us are hearing.
He remains very optimistic about the future of the .com world and
he expressed that optimism among business owners who are achieving
success. Gilmore's tour today took him to three of the hundreds of
small Internet start-ups that dot the Northern Virginia landscape.
The first stop was at Multicity.com, a company that's defying a
trend towards layoffs with a sound business model and a sense of optimism
about the industry's future.
Alain Hanash (CEO, Multicity.com): We knew the Internet was
here to stay. It's not going anywhere. Every six to eight months,
Internet usage is doubling. So we focus on building technology, preserving
our capital, and not hiring too many people.
McKelway: Of course, a good product is the key, and Multicity provides
just that--multilingual communications for Web sites so users can
communicate in different languages.
Hanash: Now that more than fifty-two percent of the Internet
users are non-English speakers, we think our technology is very beneficial
because it allows people to speak six different languages at the same
time in the same chat room.
McKelway: For Gilmore, Multicity.com represents a success story
of public-private partnership. Multicity contacted Governor Gilmore's
Office of Technology, the first such office in any U.S. state, to
make many of its foreign contacts. Gilmore remains confident despite
the economic downturn that his mission to tout Virginia as the world's
leading tech sector is the right way to go.
Virginia Governor James Gilmore: I'm optimistic because the
layoffs of the .com in this particular instance, by all evidence,
doesn't mean a decline of the industry. It means an evolvement of
the industry. It means that some applications that are not working
are not succeeding, and then people who are being laid off are going
immediately into new jobs with applications and businesses that are
working.
McKelway: That's a sentiment echoed by Dr. Robert Kahn, a man who
knows a thing or two about the Internet. He is credited with helping
to create it.
Dr. Robert Kahn (One of the Internet's Founding Fathers): What
you saw were a larger number of companies that really didn't have
business models, or certainly didn't have good business models. And
they were built on this speculative roll-up, almost like a lottery,
for a number of years, and that's come to an end.
McKelway: Despite the recent bad news about layoffs, unemployment
remains at only two percent in Virginia. Governor Gilmore believes
that the Commonwealth needs to attract another one million people
to keep its economy functioning at full capacity.
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"It's the future of the Internet...."
Red Herring Magazine |
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| "Multicity offers an excellent chat
experience..." |
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