Two years ago, Multicity enjoyed its buzz as one of the cool tech startups in a region bustling with dot-coms bloated on venture capital money. Multicity touted a chat room technology capable of instant translations in multiple languages, and was selling its wares to Web sites around the country.

In 2002, it's surprising to find a Web startup that is still around at all, given the dot-com implosion of 2000 and 2001.
Multicity is indeed still here.

Although it's still small, with just 40 employees, Multicity is getting that buzz back with its latest deal involving World Cup coverage with Canada's largest broadcaster.

Multicity is powering the interactive chats on the Canadian Broadcast Company's World Cup Web pages, offering chat rooms in eight languages. (Including Portuguese, in case you want to go talk a little smack about the U.S. team's upset of Portugal). The World Cup chat rooms can be found at http://cbc.ca/sports/soccer/forums.html.
While terms of the deal were not disclosed, Multicity CEO Alain Hanash says the company charges anywhere from $20,000 to $150,000 a year for large enterprise-level customers. Small Web sites can pay as little as $50 a month for Multicity's technology.

What's just as important as the revenue associated with such a deal is exposure. The CBC Web site is offering 24-hour coverage of the World Cup, and Canada is a multilingual country. This gives Multicity a chance to get its name out there with a major international media company.

"This is a very important deal for us because it positions Multicity as a serious provider for multilingual Web sites," Hanash says. "We're moving from the smaller Web sites to the enterprise level now."
Some two years after the dot-com bubble burst, Hanash says he's got a pipeline of about 200 deals, many with Fortune 500 companies. During the tech downturn, Hanash says he was "extremely conservative" and waited on the sidelines developing the company's technology.

Multicity, founded in 1999, has raised $15 million in venture capital from Draper Atlantic and Grotech Capital Group, but Hanash says the company is done raising outside capital.

Now, he's landing customers like PBS, Raytheon, MTV Latin America and Amnesty International. The CEO of Raytheon uses Multicity's chat room software to communicate directly with non-English employees around the world, using instant translation technologies.
Hanash says he's pushing into the college, e-government and event planning markets, which he believes could use multilingual chat rooms on their Web sites.

"We've been taking a defensive approach during the downturn, developing our technology," Hanash says. "We've taken a conservative approach and now it's paying off as our competitors run out of cash."

Copyright 2002 American City Business Journals, Inc.