Computer café queen
"Catering is very difficult, very daunting and I haven't got to grips with it yet," confesses Eva Pascoe. "I was very arrogant about it at the beginning. Now I know it's a serious business."
You wouldn't expect Pascoe to be floored by something like catering. She has a PhD in cognitive psychology, is a lecturer in human computer interaction at London's City University and has a head full of business ideas.
But it isn't her intellectual ability which makes her remark such a bombshell. Last September she launched Cyberia café, one of the most original café concepts to hit London this decade.
Cyberia is not so much about food and drink ("we want to change that") as providing cheap, public access to the Internet, the international information superhighway which, along with multi-media, is about to transform our lives.
For a small fee, customers "surf the net" on computer terminals lining Cyberia's walls, mouse buttons clicking as users delve into world-wide computer databases or send electronic mail messages winging across the globe, cappuccino and croissants at their elbows.
It has proved such a winner that within seven months, Pascoe has branched into franchising, the first outlet opening in Kingston in March, and a second making its debut in Edinburgh this month.
She's also looking for sites in Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle and Glasgow and is talking to potential franchisees in Paris, Rome and Berlin.
Pascoe sees Cyberia as a vehicle for making the Internet available to everyone. "It's been around for 20 years, kept hidden by academics, now I want it to go back to the people, to get communities involved," she says.
Pascoe buzzes with energy, talks incredibly fast with a Polish accent and has led such a hectic life that she makes a tornado look static.
Born and brought up in Poland "in the mountains", Pascoe went to university in Warsaw, then to Spain as a translator - she speaks four languages and is learning Russian - before coming to the UK eight years ago to study.
Slotted around her degree studies, she started and ran several businesses: first dress design, selling at London's Camden Market, then a banking software company and a management consultancy. "I've always had two jobs because I'm an insomniac," she jokes. "I like business. I really get excited starting up new companies and trying to grow them. I'm an entrepreneur, a driver and energiser."
Cyberia is her fourth and largest venture, funded by selling her software business and run with partner Gene Teare who handles the catering. It grew out of an idea for an Internet training centre, and was not based on San Francisco's Cyber Café, she maintains. "They only have one terminal and they don't provide training. They don't impress me. We have ten terminals."
Amazingly, Cyberia is fitted in around Pascoe's full-time lectureship at City University, which is "flexible".
Fine-tuning the catering is high on her agenda. She hopes to achieve this either through a consultant or with the help of her Kingston franchisee Geoffrey Weston, "a restaurateur and a godsend".
New franchisees will need catering skills and a strong business background, rather than computer literacy. "We can provide the technical skills and training. I am looking for the skills I haven't got," says Pascoe.
As if this isn't enough, Pascoe's restless mind is now looking at the business possibilities of putting terminals in women's hairdressers.
"They're social places, where women wait and could learn about the technology. I don't want them to be left out."
