Internet café
They are located worldwide, and many people use them when traveling to access webmail and instant messaging services to keep in touch with family and friends.
The early history of public access to online networking sites is largely unwritten and undocumented.
[2] In July 1991, the SFnet Coffeehouse Network was opened in San Francisco, United States by Wayne Gregori.
The concept of a café with full Internet access (and the name Cybercafé) was invented in early 1994 by Ivan Pope.
Commissioned to develop an Internet event for an arts weekend at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, and inspired by the SFnet terminal based cafés, Pope wrote a proposal outlining the concept of a café with Internet access.
Over the weekend of March 12–13 in the theatre at the ICA, Pope ran a Cybercafé which consisted of multiple Apple Mac computers on café style tables with menus of available services.
[6] The first public, commercial American Internet café was conceived and opened by Jeff Anderson and Alan Weinkrantz in August 1994, at Infomart in Dallas, Texas, and was called The High Tech Cafe.
[7] A bar called CompuCafé was established in Helsinki, Finland in September 1993 and relocated to larger premises in October 1994 featuring both Internet access and a robotic beer seller.
[14] In China, a 2011 government report stated that 130,000 internet cafés had closed down over the previous six years, due to tightening regulations, which brought the number down to 144,000.
[14] In some locations, however, internet cafés continued to be used for reasons ranging from evading gambling regulations to building communities of language learners.
For those traveling by road in North America, many truck stops have Internet kiosks, for which a typical charge is around 20 cents per minute.
[18] Internet cafés come in a wide range of styles, reflecting their location, main clientele, and sometimes, the social agenda of the proprietors.
The use of Internet cafés for multiplayer gaming is particularly popular in certain areas of Asia like India, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea and the Philippines.
Again, this shared-access model is more affordable than personal ownership of equipment and/or software, especially since games often require high end and expensive PCs.
To compete for market share, internet cafés have started charging less and have turned to alternate ways to maximize revenue.
In 2003 the EasyInternetcafé chain was found liable for copyright infringement occurring when customers used its CD-burning service to burn illegally downloaded music to their own CDs.
As Australia's first Internet café, founders included Gavin Murray, Rita Arrigo and Christopher Beaumont.
Warnets/netcafes are usually privately owned as bottom-up initiatives, while telecenters in rural villages are typically government or donor-funded as top-down financing.
Information on netcafe/warnet in Indonesia can also be found in a book titled: Connected for Development: Indonesian Case study.
Hourly usage rate varies between Rp 2500–15000 ($0,27 – 1,60) Japan has a strong internet café culture, with most serving a dual purpose as joint Internet-manga cafes.
The cafés are often combined with a variety of other businesses, such as chemists, manicurists, repair shops, and convenience stores.
[citation needed] In the Philippines, internet cafés, also known as computer shops (often abbreviated to comshop), are found on almost every street in major cities; and there is at least one in most municipalities or towns.
In some major cities with existing ordinances regulating internet cafés (e.g. Valenzuela, Marikina, Davao, Lapu-lapu and Zamboanga), students who are below 18 years of age are prohibited from playing computer games during regular class hours.
Such establishments soon became very popular among the Polish population, especially young people, who at the time still rarely had access to computers with high-speed Internet at home.
In Slovakia, the first Internet café was opened officially in the city of Košice on July 17, 1996, providing services such as e-mail, Gopher, News, Telnet, WWW, Talk and others to the general public.
With the growth of smartphone ownership and free Wi-Fi networks in all major public attractions, the Internet cafés now primarily cater to gamers, and some even provide food and drinks.
Reputedly, the first kosher cybercafe was the IDT Cafe in New York City's diamond district, opened in the spring of 1997.
Films such as The Beach and The Proposal feature an Internet café as a primary setting for significant plot development.
