IDEAL NET CAFE KOT ADDU,

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.

One significant historic milestone in Internet cafe history has been the introduction of the Yahoo! Mail Internet Cafe Awards, awarded in September 2004, to celebrate the 10th birthday of cybercafe industry.