Google Launches World's First Tablet Cafe
Among the washer
women, carpenters, busy waiters and squabbling children sweltering under the
midday sun on this dusty Dakar street an internet revolution is taking place in
the world's first tablet cafe. Next to the workshops, meat stores and
barbershops on what could be any bustling street in sub-Saharan Africa, a grey
concrete building stands out with a garish sign advertising the Tablette Cafe. "This
is the first tablet cafe in the world, a cafe that works with tablets,"
said Tidiane Deme, the head of Google in French-speaking Africa.
The concept,
introduced by the internet search giant, is a simple twist on the traditional
cyber cafes which have been springing up across Africa as the internet boom
takes hold, ditching PCs for tablet computers. When Medoune Seck, 33, opened
his Equinoxe cyber cafe six years ago, he quickly discovered that frequent
power cuts and exorbitant electricity bills were a major headache for him and
his customers. Then along comes Google which offered funding last year to turn
one cyber cafe in Africa into a pilot tablet cafe. Seck applied and his cuber
cafe was picked as their guinea pig. While tablets have taken advanced
industrialised countries by storm and pushed cyber cafes further to the
margins, in the developing world they could lead to their renaissance. Tablet
cafes could take hold in Africa because most people cannot afford to buy the
devices, and tablets use batteries and mobile data connections which make them
immune to power cuts. The Equinoxe now sports 15 tablets and has installed
cabins for private video chats. Three PCs stand in a corner, but they do not
generate much interest among clients, who recline on the cafe's bright orange
and blue sofas, jabbing at their touch screens. Seck says his tablets cost more
than PCs but they save on power bills as they consume 25 times less
electricity. He believes they can help revive cyber cafes which, according to
Google, are in something of a slump precisely because of the high cost of
electricity and frequent power failures cutting into business. "Tablet
computers will revolutionize Africa, and Senegal," said Seck. The
simplicity of using the touchscreen devices could help bring computing to
scores of new people. The Tablette Cafe charges the same price as its
predecessor did for PCs: 300 CFA francs (80 US cents) per hour. "Our hope
is that cyber cafes attract new customers interested in a more simple and
interactive way of going online, and make significant savings on their number
one operating expense: electricity," Alex Grouet, Google's business
development manager in Francophone Africa, said in a blog post. Cafe owners
should be able to invest the savings on electricity costs into improving their
connection speeds, he suggested, thereby boosting their clients' experience.
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