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

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.