(FORTUNE Magazine) – This fall a new inhabitant will take its place among the theaters and theme parks of Times Square--the easyEverything Internet cafe. This temple of interactivity, billed as the largest of its kind, will house 1,000 state-of-the-art Hewlett-Packard flat-panel screens, connected to the Net via lightning-fast broadband lines. The New York City location will be the 12th in a chain of cybercafes, started in London last June by Stelios Haji-Ioannou, the 33-year-old scion of a multibillion-dollar Greek Cypriot shipping empire.

If you accept conventional wisdom--and the largely indifferent reaction of America's Netizens to the cybercafe concept--there is little doubt that the future of out-of-home access to the Internet lies in portable wireless technology. Whether you want to research a business problem, respond to an e-mail, or download Dr. Dre's latest ditty, your trusty Palm computer, cell phone, or MP3 player will provide the necessary platform. But Haji-Ioannou is not a great believer in conventional wisdom. If he were, he would probably be sailing around the Mediterranean on one of his yachts instead of logging 100-hour workweeks nurturing easyEverything and his growing stable of other businesses. Haji-Ioannou has gambled $15 million of his own money--and an additional $38 million in venture capital from Hewlett-Packard and Apax Venture Partners--that thousands of students and tourists and even some businessmen will choose to access the Net from his cafes. He plans to open 20 locations this year and an additional 40 by the close of 2001. He acknowledges that the easyEverything concept is more tailored to high-foot-traffic areas like Times Square than to suburbia. And he sees his cafes more as adjuncts to, rather than replacements for, wireless gadgets. But, he says, "I love the challenge of proving the skeptics wrong."

Haji-Ioannou has dealt with skepticism before. In 1995, when he launched easyJet, Europe's first low-cost, no-frills airline, critics dismissed it as a joke for backpackers. Then they started flying. The flights are spartan--all refreshments cost extra, and a third bathroom was removed from every plane to make room for an extra seat--but full. The airline's success has spawned imitators, including GO, launched in '98 by British Airways (which easyJet is suing for anticompetitive practices). In a typical display of his marketing bluster, Haji-Ioannou and ten employees boarded GO's first flight clad in orange jumpsuits and handed out free easyJet passes. He also runs a contest every year to guess how much money GO will lose. The winner gets a pair of tickets to anywhere easyJet flies.

Virgin Atlantic impresario Richard Branson, who describes Haji-Ioannou as a "son," praises his contrarian sensibilities and consumer-friendly views and says Haji-Ioannou's willingness to duke it out with much larger competitors has made him something of a populist figure in Europe. On a recent easyJet flight to Nice, says Branson, Haji-Ioannou alternated between shaking hands with passengers and getting "down on his hands and knees picking up bits of rubbish."

Haji-Ioannou aspires to bring economies of scale to the Internet cafe. In fact, easyEverything cafes bear little resemblance to their much smaller cybercousins, which are often darkly lit hybrids of Kinko's and coffee bars, with aging terminals, second-rate dial-up connections, and cheesy names like Nutopia and XS. Besides having 20 times as many terminals, and 16-megabit-per-second connection speeds, easyEverything cafes boast another competitive advantage: They are open 24 hours a day. Since nearly 60% of the chain's customers are students and tourists, the cafes are able to generate revenues into the early hours. London's Trafalgar Square location, for example, is busiest between 1 A.M. and 2 A.M. And at an average price of $1.50 per hour (yield managed, airline-style, so that the price is higher when the stores are busiest), easyEverything is a bargain, whether you compare it with other cafes, Kinko's--or even the cost of home access.

In Europe, Haji-Ioannou's vision of the Internet cafe seems to be working. More than 170,000 people use easyEverything's London terminals each week; the company forecasts revenues of $18 million this year and expects to be profitable by 2001. An IPO is still 12 to 18 months away. Though the sale of Internet access makes up more than 50% of the chain's revenues, in-house coffee franchises and peripherals like printing and CD burning provide additional income. And when an easyEverything customer clicks on a banner ad, the chain makes 7.5 cents. "We can break even if our stores average 50% occupancy--and that's on pure Internet access and London rents," says CEO Maurice Kelly, who says that occupancy has in fact averaged 50%.

If the advertising campaign that kicked off the newest easyEverything in Amsterdam's Rembrandt Square is any indication, New Yorkers can soon expect to be blanketed in orange--the color of all of Haji-Ioannou's businesses. (They include easyRentacar, easy.com, and a nascent Internet finance site called easyBank.) The company spent $325,000 to cover the Amsterdam area with fliers, and 40 of the city's ubiquitous trams were painted orange. Before the paint had even dried, Haji-Ioannou was confronted by a competitive threat. In Rotterdam, Dutch telecom giant KPN opened a rival cafe in a building that already houses an easyEverything. KPN also tried to outbid the British company for its second Amsterdam location. Primed for combat, Haji-Ioannou regards the maneuvers as further proof of the soundness of his idea. He would have been much more irked had he been ignored. These days, though, that rarely happens.