Internet Cafe History

The founder of the first Internet cafe, Eva Pascoe, was working on her PhD at the time.

She got the idea to mixing sipping coffee to surfing the web while sitting at one of coffee shops near the City University of London.

Cafe Cyberia started with half a dozen HP computers, connected to the Internet through dial-up modems that were able to transfer data at 9.6 kilobits per second.

As the first Internet cafe, Cafe Cyberia got tremendous publicity, and additional investments into the business from likes of Mick Jagger and Maurice Saatchi.

With the success of Cafe Cyberia, the Internet Cafe business got into a flying start, and there were over 60 similar cafes over the world by the Summer of 1995.

Ms Pascoe sold her stake in Cafe Cyberia (to three Korean investors) in 1998 and moved to shape another field of online business, online fashion commerce.

If you feel nostalgic, you can still find the original Cafe Cyberia from London's West End, at Whitfield St., behind Goodge St. station. However, the cafe was renamed "Be the Reds" by the new Korean owners ("Be the Reds" is a supporting cheer for the South Korean national soccer team).

Internet Cafe History - U.S.

  Although the first Internet cafe was launched in Europe, there had been similar activity already in the U.S. even before the launch of Cafe Cyberia.

SFnet, which was launched in San Francisco in 1991 (originally as a bulletin board), was not an Internet Cafe, but rather a network of 20 coin-operated computers providing a dial-up connection to the Internet with a 2400 baud modem.

The first actual U.S. Internet cafe (according to a 1995 Wall Street Journal article) was a Chicago cyber cafe called Suba Internet Center, launched in April 1995 by Todd Bodenstein and Alex Strasheim.

Suba was located at 2945 N. Broadway in Chicago, and was sold to to Bean.Net in 2000 by the founders.

Internet Cafe History 1995 - 1999

From the tens of cybercafes by mid-1995, the industry expanded into thousands by 1997.

Internet cafes not only became a natural way for travelers to send and check email, but also a way in which local residents got access to the latest software applications.

With the continuing success of ecommerce and related fields, high-profile entrepreneur Stelios Haji-Ioannou and his company easyGroup entered Internet cafe business in 1999 with the easyInternetCafe franchise.

By 2005, easyInternetCafe had become the best known and most successful Internet cafe franchise in the world.

Internet Cafe History 2000 - Today

In the U.S., the burst of the Internet bubble by late 2000 also changed the Internet Cafe industry overnight as the sources for new venture capital money virtually disappeared.

Also, the increasing success of portable computers and WiFi Internet access, combined with the fact that more and more people were having Internet access at home, resulted in fewer customers for the Internet cafes.

However, as a dynamic industry, many new cybercafes and many of the old ones started to offer a bit more targeted services than just coffee and computers, to bring in new customers.

For example, some cybercafes started to offer services primarily for gamers (and still do).

Typically, these cafes offer the latest computer games with state of the art computers.

The success of broadband network gaming brought the concept of LAN parties to these Internet cafes, as they organise gaming tournaments over broadband LAN connections.

By late 2002, the Internet gaming cybercafes had become a huge success around the world.

For example, according to some estimates, there were over 4,000 cybercafes in Taiwan by 2002, most of them focused on providing gaming.

In South Korea, the PC Bang (the South Korean name for internet gaming cafes) industry first came into existence in the mid 1990s.

Recently, it was estimated that there were over 22,000 PC Bangs (the name of Internet gaming cafes in South Korea) in South Korea at the beginning of 2006.

In addition, during January 2006, Intel, the global PC chip manufacturer, made another milestone into the Internet cafe history by opening a 120 computer PC Bang operation at Nowon-gu, in northern Seoul, South Korea.

However, as many Internet cafes in some countries have evolved into advanced gaming or business centers, the original cybercafe idea (of providing basic Internet access) is still a major growth story in many parts of the world.

India, for example, has over 50,000 Internet cafes with over 500,000 customers each month, according to some estimates. One Indian company alone, Sify Limited, which operates the iWay Internet cafe franchises, has over 3,100 cybercafes in 149 Indian cities.