September 1st Marked the 10 year anniversary of the Cybercafe.
This is what we more commonly call a GL in Trinidad.
Read more about it here
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/...reut/index.htmlYahoo! dug up some more dirt on the industry and provided this insight into the first cybercafe.
London saw the World's first-ever Internet Café, Café Cyberia in Whitfield Street open its doors in September 1994. We asked Eva Pascoe, one of the founders and a judge for the Yahoo! Internet Café Awards, what made her come up with the idea:
In the early nineties I had spent a long time away from my family. I was working on my PhD, and had access to email. But at that time, the Internet was mainly an academic service. As other members of my family had no access to email, I had to spend a considerable amount of money on the phone bills.
Then one day I was sitting in the coffee shop close to City University. It occurred to me that it would be fun to have a cup of good coffee (those were the days pre-Coffee Republic), and bring in my laptop to the coffee shop to send emails while having a break from work. I looked around, and found some friends who were already accessing the internet at home.
We figured out that we could actually put a permanent PC connection in a coffee shop and link it to the internet. That way everybody could come in and for a small fee chat to friends and family around the world through email and Instant Messenger.
Three months later we had the first Cybercafe on Whitfield St, behind Goodge St station. The only problem was that my coffee machine could only make one cappuccino every two minutes, so the shop was full of people who were lining up to use the Internet and demanding their coffee a bit faster than I could provide!
The venture was a huge success, and we eventually got Maurice Saatchi and Mick Jagger to invest in the business. Cyberia has opened in cities as far afield as Paris, Tokyo, Bangkok and Manila and many others. A few years later I moved to my first love, interface design for women users and become a pioneer of online fashion commerce, but I am very happy that the cybercafe movement has taken off in such a fantastic way.
