with TOSHIBA TEC

The Company

easyEverything is the new kid on the block in the Internet cafe scene and they have an easy-to-use and economical philosophy. Their shops offer no frills access to banks of up to 650 terminals and users buy credit in blocks that can be redeemed over a period of time. So, if you log-out with credit to spare, you can use that some other time.

easyEverything is the sister company of easyJet and shares the same chairman, the charismatic Stelios Haji-loannou, who will be a familiar face to viewers of the TV series "Airline".

Haji-loannou, 33, set up a think-tank team in November 1998 to come up with an easy access Internet point solution. The company was born, and by the following April, had grown to a staff of 10, then the first shop opened in Victoria in central London in June 1999. The company now has four more shops in London - Tottenham Court Road, Oxford Street, Kensington High Street and Trafalgar Square.

With other British branches in Edinburgh, the company also has branches in most major European cities; Amsterdam, Barcelona, Madrid, Antwerp, Rotterdam, Munich and Brussels. The first US shop opens in prestigious Times Square, New York this November, which will offer a staggering 800 terminals. Plans are also afoot for 16 more European stores by January 2001 and a further 200 stores as soon as possible.

Even in this fast-moving technological environment, easyEverything is still very much a unique player as the World's largest Internet Cafe chain, already boasting more than 1 million visitors every month.

The Requirement

As the popularity of the World Wide Web grows, public demand is increasing for access to points to it.

Not everyone has a PC at home, or works at a computer screen and it's not just students or travellers who need to use the Internet to keep in touch. More and more people want to use the Web for e-mail messaging, as a reference library to gather information or for buying and selling products.

Internet or Cyber Cafes aren't new, they've popped up on virtually every high street over the last few years, but there's now an array of differing styles of cafe. You can look up anything and everything on the Internet and download information in seconds - so it's not necessarily a leisurely hour spent nursing a coffee and a croissant that people want.

To pop in just to check if there are any e-mails in your inbox can be expensively off-putting if you have to pay for half an hour or an hour up-front.

easyEverything's European Expansions Manager, Andrew Croft explained: "We provide Internet access to the general public in a fairly unique way, as they buy a ticket with credit on it rather like a phone card. So that they can use this credit over a period of 28 days, we issue a user identity ticket with a unique number from our store management system database."

"We wanted a printing system that allowed us to print a ticket on medium weight card that wouldn't degrade and so was reusable, rather than a thermal ticket," said Andrew.

The Solution

easyEverything chose Toshiba TEC B-452 printers to issue the individual tickets from a bespoke Hewlett Packard store management system.

Toshiba TEC has certainly made things as easy as possible for its client. It supplies all the tickets witha pre-printed logo, together with ribbons and till roll receipts which were important for the project. Toshiba TEC stores them all until required by easyEverything.

Andrew Croft admits that this is an unusual application for the Toshiba TEC equipment as it is more likely to be used for printing barcodes, but reliability in the high-volume environment was the key in the selection process.

Benefits

He said: "The ticket printers are very reliable and quite compact and we find that the ticket issue is very good. They also provide us with the possibility of subsequent upgrades, even to barcodes which we may want to do at some stage. We are probably only using a fraction of their potential at the moment."

There are 18 B-452's in use - that's 2 per store, and in August the company begun trialling a vending card machine in its Tottenham Court Road store, which also makes use of the Toshiba TEC printers.