Quick Facts
Biography
Eva Pascoe is a Polish-born entrepreneur residing in London who co-founded Britain's first Internet cafe, Cyberia.
Career
Eva studied cognitive psychology at the University of London. She co-founded Britains first Internet cafe called Cyberia located in London 39 Whitfield Street. Cyberia was active from September 1994 to October 1999.
Eva created the first HTML courses for the public in Cyberia and ran the first women-only courses for women interested in getting into technology. Eva and her co-founders were focusing on closing the gender gap in technology use as in 1994 women were less than 3% of Internet users.
Broadcasting
Eva was the technical journalist for The Independent from 1995–2001, commentating on the increase power of the Web, growth of Network society and increasing risk of cybersecurity issues. She also contributes to Centre for London, Newsnight, Questions Time and runs her innovation blog at evapascoe.com since 2013 covering digital retail and social media technology.
Topshop
In 1999 she was invited by then CEO of Arcadia Group to set up an ecommerce team for Topshop fashion. Her team developed the first ecommerce websites for fashion in UK and expanded online presence to all Arcadia and Daily Mail brands. The joint venture was called Zoom, with Eva as MD. Darren Shapland, her co-MD and Paul Zwillenberg, later MD of Daily Mail were the other board members.
The initial Arcadia system was developed jointly by ICL, under the leadership of Tony Booth who has formulated the original concept of online fashion shopping for large fashion brands. His team created the shopping carts, integrated payment gateway and SSL.
Eva worked in Arcadia under John Hoerner, Stuart Rowe and eventually Philip Green who acquired the business in 2004 and transferred Topshop from the Public Company status to a privately held business.
High Street revival
In 2013 Eva was invited to join Bill Grimsey in the High Street Report, a group of experts who correctly forecast the imminent changes to the High Street, predicting move to online to eliminate need for High Street stores in UK.
The report was presented to Brandon Lewis and a subject of House of Commons Committee meeting, with a further House of Commons debate on the 17th June 2013 resulting in some changes to allocation of business rates.
Forecasts
Eva correctly predicted in 1999 that mobile phones will be used for shopping and browsing on the morning and evening commute- in a public exchange with Alan Sugar who claimed that 'I am either in the office or at home ona desktop, so there is no need for sending information to me via mobile phone"