A continental airspace closure took precedent in September 11, 2001 when the US had to close its airspace in order to neutralize potential further attacks.

The eruption of Icelandic Mount Eyjafjallajokull and the resulting volcanic ash cloud over Europe have caused severe flight disruptions since last week, grounded millions of people, tones of cargo and disrupted international air traffic over Europe and the Atlantic.

The above had enormous affect on trade, business and insurance. Not to mention convenience. The ecological effect is too soon to evaluate, however has a destructive potential on climate in case of severe eruption.

Europe is operating several airports and KLM has started today a gradual procedure in order to restore its flight schedule.

The continental boycotting due to the volcanic ash over Europe is gradually removed today in order to allow the millions of passengers and tones of cargo to start flying again.

It is amazing how such a simple incident could have grounded Europe traffic for few days and cause such damage.

KLM has announced today that:

Flights to and from Amsterdam Airport Schiphol

We have resumed operations in a phased manner. 

This means that we have started to operate European flights into and out of Amsterdam. In the coming days we expect to gradually go back to our normal schedules.

European flights

On Wednesday 21 April, as of 14.00 hours ( Amsterdam time), we will start to operate some flights to the United Kingdom. As of 22 April, we will try to get back to our normal schedules to and from the UK.

We also expect that later today, 21 April, we will be able to resume some flights to Norway, Sweden, Finland and Germany.

Intercontinental flights

All intercontinental flights to Amsterdam are expected to arrive on Wednesday 21 April.

All intercontinental flights from Amsterdam are expected to depart on Wednesday 21 April.

KLM together with Schiphol airport urging passengers not go to the airport if their flight is cancelled. It will take some time before all flights will be back on schedule.

It might be the right place to acknowledge the dedication of some European airports that made many efforts to assist passengers in providing them place to sleep, water and food. This was an extraordinary action on behalf of airports.

Final frontier, as James T. Kirk used to call it.

Today, Endeavour space scuttle took off again in one of its last missions as the whole shuttles project will be terminated by the end of this year. The space shuttle Endeavour has set off for the International Space Station (ISS) on a repair mission and the video can be seen below.

The story of the NASA project is both unique and tragic. It has began some 40 years ago based on even earlier concepts of reusable space shuttles. Six Space Shuttle orbiters were built; the first, Enterprise, was used only for testing purposes. Five space-worthy orbiters were:

 Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour.

• On January 28, 1986, orbiter Challenger (OV-099) disintegrated 73 seconds after launch in a dreadful explosion well remembered by anyone who have ever seen it.
• On February 1st, 2003 Columbia was lost during reentry.

In both cases, NASA lost all astronauts and mission specialists onboard and went through a process that risked the entire project.

Endeavour was built as a replacement to Challenger. Columbia was never replaced.

Believe it or not but we are witnessing history in the making as the Shuttles project will be terminated by the end of the year. Further NASA projects will imitate the old way of taking off on a top of a missile and landing with parachutes into the sea, just like in the old Apollo program.

So space shuttles as we used to see them are terminating an era in space exploration and will not be replaced by reusable shuttles. It is impossible to evaluate how many people worldwide were touched by the ambitious NASA shuttles project. It started by a mass correspondence to the white house, by Star Trek series fans to change the first shuttle’s name from Constitution to Enterprise and became part of all of us with its victories and failures. The tragedies affected our life.

I clearly remember myself as 18 years old teenager watching the documentary movie Hail Columbia at the Air & Space museum in Washington on a giant screen. It was an amazing movie and one of the only few I witnessed people cheering to a movie at the end of it.

 Therefore, every time they take off, we hold our breath, together with all NASA employees and pray to see it landing safely.

This post is dedicated to the brave men and women who lost their life in this project and to their families. They made us so proud.

President Reagan said in the memorial service of Challenger:

” Sometimes, when we reach for the stars, we fall short. But we must pick ourselves up again and press on despite the pain”.

Challenger: STS-51-L crew: Michael J. Smith, Dick Scobee, Ron McNair. Ellison S. Onizuka, Sharon Christa McAuliffe, Greg Jarvis, and Judy Resnik.

Columbia STS-107 crew:  Rick D. Husband, William C. McCool, David M. Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Michael P. Anderson, Laurel B. Clark and Ilan Ramon (Col. IAF) . (Pic by NASA).

However, as from last night, there is an unusual additive to the building: the Dutch brewery started brewing browsers… Google Chrome to be exact. Slides of the browsers logo are projected on the outside wall of the Heineken building to be seen by nearly frozen by passers.

We are witnessing Google efforts to promote their almost two years old browser. One can see Chrome advertisements everywhere on newspapers, magazines and of course online.

In terms of popularity and according to Net Applications, Google Chrome web browser has just passed Apple’s safari and is occupying the third place in popularity after Internet Explorer various versions and Firefox. This popularity is expected to grow once Google will release it Chrome OS.

In case you are wondering which browser will be the most popular in two three years from now, the answer is somewhat surprising: whatever they will be named, they will be installed on mobile devices, namely, mobile phones.

According to Gartner, somewhere at 2013 browser-equipped phones will exceed 1.83 billion, compared with 1.78 billion PCs worldwide.

Get ready.

The new phone, categorized as a Super phone, is produced by HTC and runs on the Android 2.1 mobile operating system.

 As it seems right after the Google announcement, most speculations as for the technical specifications of e the new phone were accurate.

Nexus One Google new SuperPhone. Screenshot

Nexus One technical specifications:

• operating system: Android 2.1
• 3.7-inch display, 480 x 800 OLED display
• Processor: 1GHz Snapdragon from Qualcomm
• 5-megapixel camera with LED flash (guys from iphone, pay attention here: flash, you didn’t see it coming, did you?)
• Audio stereo Bluetooth
• Active noise cancellation using two microphones
• Live-action wallpaper that responds to your touch
• Google Maps navigation
• Improved Facebook integration

So, after all the hype created, the mother of all questions? Are we witnessing a revolution in either concept, design, technology or performance? More importantly: is this an iphone killer?

The answer is no to both parts unfortunately. Improved? Yes, but no revolution this time.

Nexus One demonstrate one interesting feature  is the voice to text capability. In terms of cool, this is a major one. It is so much easier to talk to a gadget rather than typing it on small keys or touch. These things are usually coming with a short period of training the algorithm and are not 100% accurate, but this is very interesting feature. It is more interesting by the fact that the voice recognition is being processed by Google servers, not the phone itself.

As expected the Nexus One demonstrated a friendly high resolution Google Earth feature. The application did respond to voice orders.

Other new software applications are: live background, new weather and news applications.

Nexus One Price:

The expected prices are: 529$ for unlocked Nexus One phone without service plan and 179$ for a phone with a T-Mobile plan.

The Nexus One will be launched today in the US, UK, Singapore and Hong Kong.

 New Google market

Google that started as a search provider, evolved to other fields such as browsers and ended up as the world’s largest advertiser has entered today to the field of retailing of phones and service plans.

 So far, Google sells only one phone, the Nexus One and one service plan on its Google phone marketplace, but that would change soon.

The concept here is worth mentioning: Google aims to provide and sell phones with simple service attached in a simple online way. The concept makes sense, however, we remember clearly many cases in which general retail shops failed selling mobile phone due to the high involvement customer required in purchasing mobile phones. Let’s see how Google addresses this problem with its new Nexus One phone and the online Marketplace.

EU banking basic fees were reported to fluctuate from 27 Euros annual fees in Bulgaria, via 46 Euros in the Netherlands and up to 154 in France and 253 in Italy.

The EU report covers prices of various banking fees of 224 banks, accounting for 81% of the EU market.

 Another exposed issue was the clarity of services, terms, conditions and engagement rules with the bank. Many customers reported the level of clarity in given services was

very low, misleading and insufficient.

The above findings are just the tip of the iceberg as the report itself suggest. The report suggested that some of the misleading is intentional and revealed banking hidden fees and failing customers as a trend.

OK, what did I miss?

High street Banks are acting like some dodgy money exchange shops? What is going on here?

A little economic crisis and the banks are losing it? Just when we thought general trust in the financial system could not be worse…

Well, here is the main problem here: banks are essential part of our economy and finance foundations. If we have problem in this level, the whole system built on it will not function well.

Unfortunately, EU officials have only exposed the problem and are leaving each country and law enforcement agencies to take care of the rest.

The EU officials exposing the problem and publishing it deserve recognition for what they did, however, there is a lot to do in order to set a clear EU message to all EU financial institutes:

Zero tolerance towards dishonest banks and financial services!

EU commission and each EU country should impose strict regulations concerning banking fees and services. It is not possible that the whole world will try to recover from one of its deepest slow downs while banks will row the opposite direction.  This really has to finish.