In 2004, while being 22 years old and studying Development Studies in the UK & Lebanon, and after having spent few years volunteering with environmental & sustainability focused organizations such as the WWF, ELIX, CRTD-A, I decided to create COGNITERRA in Athens, Greece with one thing in mind: To expand sustainability awareness raising in the Mediterranean region and develop new activities involving youth in new and even better ways than those he had experienced in the previous years.

The organization was very successful at delivering its mission as in its first 5 years of existence; it developed prestigious partnerships and implemented a number of awareness raising activities with the British Council of Greece, the Mediterranean Information Office as well as other key partners.

It also motivated and involved European & Mediterranean youth in multiple volunteering, awareness campaigns, exchanges, seminars and other activities with partners across Turkey, Sweden, Italy, FYROM and France via the European Commission’s Youth Program as well as through the United Nations Online Volunteering program.
COGNITERRA was also appointed by the Euro-Mediterranean Anna Lindh Foundation in Egypt as its exclusive youth partner (focal point) for Greece.

In 2009, we felt that we needed to acquire new experiences, explore different professional & entrepreneurial environments & develop our knowledge and skills before we would be able to take COGNITERRA to the next step and continue its mission. Thus, we decided to freeze its activities until the conditions were right.

Three years later, in 2012, in the midst of a global financial crisis, COGNITERRA is revived in Athens for continuing its’ vision with the same values, but with a different identity and in a totally new context!

Its’ new identity incorporates its’ old mission and takes it even further for responding to the challenges faced by the global community today as well as in the decades to come.

Stay tuned: www.cogniterra.org

Trailer from This space available on Vimeo.

This is a very interesting project about reclaiming public space and the effect of advertising on the image of any city.

During the last months I have been working with an amazing team of really interesting professionals for the AEGEANALE which is a hybrid art & tourism project.

I believe that combining two or more elements when identifying a project or a company is generally wrong as its much better for one's mission to be one thing and do one thing well than being several things and doing most, if not all, of them below "well".

But for this project, being quite unique in its kind, I think it is fair to say that it is equally both things.

The AEGEANALE aims to become a leading art platform in the Aegean region which is one of the most touristic regions in the world. It includes hundreads of islands and resort destinatinations, shared between Greece & Turkey. Here is a map (source: wlu.edu)

The platform/project will invite internationals to create temporary and permanent art works as well as events including preformances, music, theater and other.

The tourism dimension of the project arises the moment you have all the conteporary art installations and the cultural events across the Aegean sea. The platform creates a massive added value from a destination point of view which, if curated correctly, can allow for the design of amazing experiential travel products for art lovers.

I will be writing more about it as the project progresses.

The final website is not yet up and running, but it should be within the coming weeks. This is the URL: aegeanale.org

 

Today was the first time that I was watching one of the many RedBull videos that get uploaded everyday on YouTube and I saw relevant ads.

Really its the first time that I was watching a video about snowboarding and I saw ads about snowboarding gear and a greek ecommerce site with relevant content.

It can't be that hard to avoid showing whatever comes first?! Its all about relevance and at YouTube they don't seem to get my preferences and my patterns. Its been quite some time I subscribed to RedBull's YouTube channel and it took them about 100 videos to figure out that I definitely do not like that weird ads they serve in front of my screen...!

They keep showing me ads for things I will never want to click on, or even less buy them. Telecom ads especially are hitting on my nerves really and they keep poping up again and again...I finally start to hate these companies and Google, for not considering this!

 

I started writing down words that symbolize Greece. Then I asked some friends to do the same and we came up with this:

Created using wordle

Few days ago I was watching euronews, which is a channel dedicated to general international news i.e. economy, politics, finance etc. It is available across Europe. For sports there is another one which is called eurosport. Same concept.

And I realized that this type of media that loop all day long the same information exist in other forms of media aswell apart from TV. There are radio stations which loop news information all day long and obviously print & web are by default a more static sort of media where you can find all day the same information until new information comes in or gets printed. Its a weird example I know but you understand what I mean.

Now let's take a niche case study: the Tourism industry

It is one of the leading industries worldwide. It generates nearly 10% of the global GDP. And yet the only news-related media that a professional who works in the travel trade can find, are travel news websites with texts, images and videos and few (very few) print media which strugle to stay alive. Probably by now there also the related mobile apps from these websites to get this information while on the move.

And it striked me: Why do we (tourism professionals) have to constantly read the information about our industry? Is it that hard to create a radio station streaming only online (also via mobile) that will deliver all day long a news loop for travel trade news. And yes it should probably allow us to personalize what we want to hear.

So imagine you wake up in the morning or at whatever time you wake up, you do whatever you do jogging / breakfast ..etc. and while you are commuting to work (by public transport, by foot, by car, by bike...) you listen from your mobile to the latest travel trade news which include some super targeted advertising related only to you and your profile.

In less than 10 minutes you have a super complete overview of that day's travel trade news. If you wish to go deeper in a subject that interest you more, you can always do so by going online on your mobile or at your desktop. 

If such a service existed, I would unsubscribe automatically the next day from the loads of tourism newsletters I am forced to read everyday to know what is happening.

Really! I am tired with reading all that information every morning, plus most of them have overlapping information but do have some differences so you can not avoid reading and reading and reading and your mailbox getting full all the time. Plus they send you irrelevant advertisements which fill your mailbox even more! Its a helpless situation...

I would be glad to hear comments on this.

 

It was really great to watch all these videos on Youtube from LeWeb this year. I wasn't there but I think I got quite a good feeling of the vibe, the ideas & various trends that were being discussed across the 3 days.

A couple of things that did strike me:

• Why do we still talk in Europe about the role of governments in the start up ecosystem? Its obvious that creative people are everywhere and some of them will make the step and reach out to investors wherever these are for setting up a company. The location where you set up your company and the taxation is really another issue. But trying to create a cocoon for attracting innovative minds that will create high growth companies through legal and tax reforms is really not going to work for young entrepreneurs I think.
• Why do we still speak in English? I don't have the stats in front of me now, but we have seen that English is not any more THE language of the web and mobile. There must be multilingual support and they must invite people who do not speak English or do not want to speak English to present their amazing companies and start ups. Really some of us will never get the right accent or adequate vocabulary so why exclude for example Brazilian, Japanese, Russian or other entrepreneurs who are not advanced English speakers? Language was and is a barrier to such events and it should not be any more.

NaturCert is a company I started in February 2008 from Athens, Greece with the aim of offering sustainability certification to the tourism industry. It was my second company, and unfortunately I had to close it 3 years later, in early 2011.

I did many mistakes, MANY!, I learnt tremendously from my mistakes and I am sharing the lessons I learnt here with this post in order to help future young entrepreneurs to avoid similar mistakes.

So I will try to be as "raw" as possible to help you understand the importance of those lessons :-)

I started the company based on an idea I had: to sell an independent & private sustainability certification system/product for each segment of the tourism industry (i.e. hotels, travel agents, tour operators, PCO/MICE, Sea transport etc.).

The company would provide the certification consulting through a large network of international consulting partners, and the certification auditing through an equally large network of independent auditors and auditing entities. 

Seven months after we started, we had the global hit with the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the start of the recession which gradually was making things worse for the tourism industry, pushing the green/sustainability agenda further to the back of the priorities list of our potential clients. Mainly the hotels...

The future started to look a bit blurry from that point but I was too inexperienced and I had too little knowledge of business & management for being able to understand it and see the end coming.

This market was not a huge one globally but it surely fitted more than 1-2 key players. There were nearly 1 Mil. travel & hospitality companies that could be targeted, easily leading to a market size between 0,5 - 1 Bil. Euros.

There were not that many players in this market but from 2008 we saw hundreds of them popping up like mushrooms in every possible country in the world.

So in our best and most optimistic view we could expect to have 20% of this international niche market, thus aiming to hit at some point an annual turnover of around 200 Mil. EUR. 

All of that sounds probably OK to you..right !!?

Well the truth always lies in the details, so here they are:

Lessons learned:

I won't go through all the lessons I learnt, just some key lessons which are worth noting:

1. Expert advice: Lets face it, do you really think you have all the (correct) answers...?
2. Investment: Investing your own savings and borrowing from friends and family is just wrong. There is a tremendously huge ecosystem of investors of all types and sizes. Just go there! If none of them accept it, then you may reconsider it as there has to be something wrong with it...really! And don't think that they don't give you money because your idea is so amazing that they simply don't get it!
3. Market research: Reading about a trend in magazines, blogs and newsletters doesn't constitute market research....journalists and bloggers get more readers when they write nice stories regardless if they are true or not, and most of them have some direct or indirect hidden interests behind these stories.
4. Customers: How on earth does one start a business without having run some beta/pre-launch research and simple surveying potential clients? Just because it feels right it doesn't mean it is right... 
5. Pricing: Did you even care to calculate the margins (fixed costs/variable costs), the cost of sales, the economies of scale....? Additionally did you ask the potential customers if they would like to add a new annual cost of around 3.000 EUR in to their budgets which also forces them to change some key operational processes? 
6. Sales: So you want to create a global network of re-sellers/partners. Have you estimated how much investment, resources and time this requires? Who is and who is not the correct partner? Channels for finding them?
7. Marketing: Any idea on how you will reach out to the potential customers? or just spamming and trying to meet them at B2B fairs is good enough?
8. Fail fast: 12 - 18 months is more than enough to see whether you can or can not make this work. No need to wait for the 36th month... :-)