Marcus Zacco just launched a website with an interactive live cooking show every Sunday. It’s in Swedish. He starts out this Sunday (June 28) with making sushi. For the coming programs, he will be inviting professional chefs to cook.

It all starts Sunday June 28 @ 14:00 (2 PM) CET (GMT+1).

http://www.sondagsstek.se/

This blog post has been out there for a while, but nevertheless interesting. I like the metaphor with mountains throughout the discussion.

Imagine that products are mountains. To build a product, you will need to climb that mountain. Some mountains have a big pot of gold at the top, and some do not. In order to make money, you will need to pick the right mountain and then successfully climb to the top and gather up the gold. You can fail by choosing a mountain that has little or no gold at the top, or by dying on the way up.

Read more on Paul Buchheit’s blog: http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2008/03/ideas-vs-judgment-and-execution_9197.html

A report by Taige Zhang on the European Web Startup Environment.

This presentation analyzes and ranks 32 EU countries based on three factors that make a country great for web startups: being tech-oriented, having an entrepreneurial culture, and possessing sufficient resources. The best places to start up in Europe are the following countries: Finland, France, Germany, Netherland, Sweden, and UK.

You can find it here: http://intelligentshare.com/2009/04/defragmenting-eus-web-startup.html

Are you swedish, or do you happen to pass by Sweden this summer? Then maybe you’re up for Sweden Social Web Camp.

Read more:
http://www.whatsnext.se/2009/04/22/arets-hajk-sweden-social-web-camp/

Load Impact gives you the opportunity to see whether your website will be able to stand different loads. By registering you can test your website for free and save the results from up to 5 runs.

They also have different plans for different loads and different tools.

It’s time to apply to the Mini Seedcamp in Helsingborg, Sweden!

Mini Seedcamp Sweden will connect 20 top quality, early stage web tech startups with over 50 regional and European esteemed, sought after and highly experienced entrepreneurs, investors and developers that will blow your socks off.

Go here:
http://seedcamp.com/pages/sweden09

How do you turn consistency into something inspiring?

I think consistency is a very important factor and those who stick with their ideas and philosophy. It can be hard over time to keep in mind where this philosophy comes from or it could even be forgotten. That’s what happens when a company is suddenly offering products and/or services that are just not consistent with what the company was originally all about. And that’s when customers start to complain or just lose interest in the company and its products and/or services. It’s a very bad spiral that can eventually kill the company if it’s not identified and proper actions are taken.

So, how do we use consistency to find inspiration?

Look back at what inspired you to go down this path in the first place. Why did you decide your company was going to be based on this particular philosophy? Remind yourself! Have a chat with everyone in the company about what it is all about. Why are we doing this? Who are we helping and in what way? Is there something we can improve to make our philosophy more obvious in our products and/or services?

When you have spent some time doing this you are likely to feel that inspiration that got you started in the first place.

So remember. It doesn’t matter if you are just starting a company or if you’ve been going for many years already: Stay consistent and find inspiration in what inspired you in the first place!

For now, just log into your AdSense account, select the My Account Tab, then Account Settings. Under Account Settings select Ad Display Preference and you’ll see the dropdown for selecting a preferred Google Adsense font.

Google has opened up the possibility of choosing between Arial, Times and Verdana for one’s AdSense ads. That’s good progress. I think the standardized display is a weakness of AdSense/AdWords. It makes the ads less interesting. So this is a step in the right direction. Now they should also figure out a way for the advertiser to have a bigger influence on the formatting of the ad.

Check out the blog post here (thanks to Jonas Lejon for the tweet linking here):
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-adsense-lets-publishers-change-fonts/8714/

The fact that it’s better to have someone else say good things about you is quite well established. But I think this blog post illustrated the differences in a good way:

http://www.quicksprout.com/2007/10/24/the-difference-between-marketing-pr-advertising-and-personal-branding/

I’m not sure if this is intended as a joke or not. I know their finance is a bit screwed, but do they really want to go this far?

Check the link:
http://www.petitiononline.com/lugums18/petition.html