From the JIBC Editor-in-Chief

First Author's Name: Dr Nikhil Agarwal
First Author's Title/Affiliation: Editor-in-Chief JIBC
Email: nikhil.jibc(at)gmail.com
Brief Biographic Description: Dr Agarwal an international expert on ICT, Internet Governance and Policy. He has lectured around the world on IT Strategy, eCommerce, eGovernance and Technology Policy. Other than his full time responsibilities, he is serving as Co-Chair of ISOC AC (Internet Society); High-Level-Adviser to UN GAID and member of numerous editorial boards/review panels. He is currently Director of Europe Asia Business School (EABS), Pune.

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Journal of Internet Banking and Commerce, From the JIBC Editor-in-Chief

The Economic Effect of The Eyjafjallajokull: South Asian Perspective
Seven million passengers stranded; 22 Airspaces closed; 95000 flights canceled; $ 1.7 B lost in airlines revenue (Business loss – unestimated).

The complete aviation sector was thrown in the state of chaos and shock with a small natural activity resulting in billions of dollars loss in business (yet to be estimated). The impact of Eyjafjallajokull was well evident in South Asian countries. Few days back, I met a small scale businessman who was supposed to travel to UK to close a tender, unfortunately, due to disruption in travel he was not able to go and tender was lost. There are several of such unaccounted deals which are lost resulting in severe impact on the business in developing world.

What should we do: Certainly the dependency on air travel would be increasing in the years to come. At the same time the climate advocates would suggest that mother nature will be more disruptive than ever. I think we should try to find the solution soon enough before another crisis stuck (natural or man-made). The first step is to get administration ready to handle crisis, in majority of the cases whenever a crisis stuck we find administration cripples with pressure and start looking at each other for answers. The second step could be to align the communication going to the general public. In the current global 'dependent' economy, the role of central agencies like UN should become effective. Majority of developing countries may not be aware of the impact of crisis due to lack of proper information. Probably, it is a good idea to create outward communication agency at UN level to channelized communication to various member countries of the world.

Your views are welcome on how we can make best use of internet for an alternative to the travel needs of the world.

After the successful first edition of ICEP09’ at Morocco; JIBC is proud to be associated with the second edition of ICEP 10’ (International Conference of eCommerce, ePayments and New Entrepreneurship) www.icep2010.com to be hosted at beautiful city of Gdansk, Poland from September 14^th – 16^th 2010. The registration and paper submission is underway; I must encourage you to visit Poland this September to participate in a rare conclave of industry and academia.

Call for papers can be downloaded from http://www.icep2010.com/c4p_icep2010_gdansk.pdf

Most of you must have noticed we have entered in our 15^th issue, which would mean JIBC is completing 15 glorious years online. I must thank our authors, editors and readers for continuous support of JIBC. The special thanks goes to Nahum Goldmann the Publisher of JIBC for taking the mental of setting up an online journal in the adolescent age of internet. Three Cheers to everybody !!!

Please do feel free to write back for feedbacks & suggestions.

Have a profitable quarter ahead.

Nikhil