Post cards giving way to e-mail

Advertiser Staff

For many tourists visiting Hawai'i, e-mail has taken the place of sending post cards.

Debbie Mueller, the owner of Fishbowl Internet on Kuhio Avenue, said about 80 percent of her customers are tourists who use AOL, Hotmail or Yahoo to stay in touch with friends and family.

"We have all ages, from kids traveling with their parents chatting with friends, to grandparents sending to grandchildren," said Mueller, a German native who has run the cafe since February. Fishbowl Internet is one of 13 Internet cafes in Hawai'i listed on the cybercafes. com Web site.

The Hawai'i sites are among more than 4,000 cybercafes that have opened worldwide, including more than 475 in the United States, according to Cybercafes.com (www. cybercafes.com), a Web-based cafe locator. And that's just for starters as companies, such as gourmet coffee superstore Starbucks, begin adding Internet access to their operations.

According to the experts tourists are one of the main groups frequenting cybercafes.

At the Waikiki cafe, a popular service is downloading pictures from digital cameras. Some customers put their digital photos on a CD which frees up memory for taking more pictures. Others bring processed photos in for scanning and attaching to e-mail messages.

The cafe charges $1 per 10 minutes of computer time.

Mueller targets her advertising to tourists with fliers at hotels and the airport and advertisements in This Week and Oahu Gold.

And while Mueller may have a cafe full of tourists, she says she does not sell post cards.