Cremerie N° in the old Postal Building
reinvented as the first Internet Cafe in Paris
1994
The fortunes of Sony did not last,
Akio Morita the founder of the Japaneese company
and inventor of the Walkman stepped down from the company board
folling a heart attack.
Almost overnight everything changed
and very quickly new
revenues needed to be found.
Thurn & Taxis was not there any more to help
but we remembered his lesson
of the difficulties the old postmasters had to face
always leading to new ideas.
The first idea was to sell American Phonelines
via a Callback system.
Before the liberalisation of the European voice phone markets
it was possible to bypass the expensive local phone rates
using a phonesignal coming from California.
Receiving a commision on phone bills new income building up.
1997
Soon was added an internet cafe.
The first years of the cafe were difficult ...
not enough people were using internet,
not enough customers at the cafe.
Phone commission from California took time to build up.
Before beeing able to settle
a retirement pension fund send his huissiers
to collect delayed payments for social security charges.
As we could not pay fast enough
all the computers in the cafe were taken.
Things are not always easy in France ...
What would the old Postmasters have done ?
After closing the Cremerie for 3 days
we got a shopping card from Fnac
buying two new computers payable in 24 monthly payments.
Another one was found in front of a "poubelle" (trash can)
It was not working, but with 3 computers
the cybercafe
looked less poor than with 2.
The cafe got a new name "Cybercafe de Paris"
and we went to see every Hotel Concierge in the center of Paris
telling them that hey could send American clients
asking for something called "email acces" or web-connection"
.
Posters were the new decoration
The cafe attracted American pioneers
desperately looking for web acces
while travelling through Paris.
Without realizing it we run into the most fascinating people.
Most were young,
very young and nobody knew who they were
or who they were going to become,
They might not have known it themselves.
Others were a little older
one was the assistant of Dr Jon Postel
who had invented the dot com system
he showed us how to register domain names.
One if the World's shortest Internet Domains,
a
Two Letter .com
is in the hands of the Cremerie.
There are only 696 of them.
 
Another one had been on the first flight to the moon.
And another one
had once been a friend of the inventer of the phone.
It was the same Aimée de Heeren
already mentioned before.
1999
The cafe started to boom,
more and more tourists looking for a web connection
and rather quickly all overdue payments from the Sony times
were paid off.
2000
Time for a new Telecom idea
Phone Book of the World.
The internet domains
phonebookoftheworld.com and thurnundtaxis.com
were both registered the same moment
at the old postal building now an internet cafe
2000 january 25
The price was 35$ each.
The Phone Book of the World project
was entirely financed by the revenues of the internet cafe.
A little more about the friend of the inventer of the phone.
The article already mentioned Aimée de Heeren,
Thurn & Taxis had left us as a friend.
She now came for web lessons.
Aimée was amused to tell people that were 40 years younger
and that were scared to get a computer,
that "of course" she was online.
At the time we still did not know her real age.
Aimée liked to be with young people.
When she was young she had met an inventor who had told her.
"To stay young, you need to have young friends."
2006
We always wanted to know the name of the inventor
but we had to wait until 2006 august,
the last days of her life, Lenox Hill Hospital in New York
so she would tell us her secret:
Alexander Graham Bell.
Releasing Bell's name
would betrayed the secret of her age.
Oh the invention of the phone, that was a long long time ago
now we knew she was much older
than we ever beleived.
What a surprise not only her age
but also the massive age difference.
Well it's a little original to have had a friend in common with
someone that was born in 1847 and that invented the telephone.
Aimée had walked through the entire century.
Everybody was fascinated by her beauty charisma,
Bell, Edison, Kennedy, Chanel, Thurn & Taxis
and of course us.
Webdesigner Louis Henri Schlumberger N°22 came in 2012
We hired him because his aunt Sao Schlumberger
was a friend of Thurn & Taxis.
Luckily Louis is less exuberant than Sao ...
The picture shows him with the first Paris Phone Book
published in 1889.
The website continues to be created from the exact same place.
Sometimes when programming webpages
we are watching
the water fountain for the post horses.
It's
as if the spirit of Telecommunication
has never left ....
In this image showing our audience
you also have two pictures of our courtyard,
one is from 1699,
At the time
Louis Leon Pajot was 21
Anselm Franz von Thurn & Taxis 19,
The other one is from 2018,
319 years later.
Phone Book of the World visitors come from eveywhere,
and there are more visitors from New York,
Melbourne, Sydney and London than from Paris.
The Thurn & Taxis Thaler and Chanel's little jewel
have financed a global business.
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