What does Google TV do for Sony?

Quick, which company is bigger: Google or Sony?

If you answered Google, you'd be wrong -- at least when it comes to sales. Google pulled in $23.7 billion in revenue last year compared with Sony's $77.6 billion.

But if one judges it by the amount of press generated by Thursday's announcement that Sony would be the first to come out with a television set incorporating the Google TV platform, the reverse is true. News hits generated by a (Google) search for "Sony Internet TV" yielded 2,190 stories in the last 24 hours, whereas "Google TV" came up with 5,300 results.

So what does the Japanese consumer electronics giant get from the alliance, if not press? As it turns out, potentially quite a bit, said Jonathan Gaw and Danielle Levitas, two technology analysts with IDC. They boil it down to three crucial benefits:

1. Sony gets to set itself apart from the pack, for a short time. Television makers have been waging a battle against commodity pricing, particularly from savvy upstarts such as Vizio. While this has been a great boon to shoppers, it's annihilated company profits, especially for premium players such as Sony. Being first to have Google TV gives Sony a chance to differentiate its TV sets with snazzy apps, bite-sized software and services that can be delivered to the TV straight from the Internet without a computer. But all TV makers will eventually have access to Google TV, Levitas said, so the window of opportunity will be brief.

2. Sony potentially gets access to a new revenue stream -- search referrals. While Google and Sony would not talk about what, if any, revenue-sharing arrangements they've agreed to, Gaw thinks Google will do what it typically does with partners: share the wealth.

"That’s what Google does with everyone,” he said. “If you send them a search, they give you a cut of the revenue. The consumer electronics guys have never had that before.” 

3. Sony gets a software platform. Apart from video games, Sony has gotten a steady diet of criticism over the years for its software. Instead of insisting on doing all of its own software, Sony is starting to call in outside partners. Google is the most high-profile partner, but not the first. Earlier this year, Sony worked with a small software company, Chumby Industries, to develop its Dash device.

"Software plays an increasingly important role in devices, but it's not Sony's forte," Gaw said. "So they partner with whoever they can to give them a leg up."

For now, that leg up is coming from Google.

Wedding conducting Robot

TOKYO: Almost everyone stood when the bride walked down the aisle in her white gown, but not the wedding conductor, because she was bolted to her chair.

The nuptials at this ceremony were led by "I-Fairy,'' a 4-foot tall seated robot with flashing eyes and plastic pigtails. Sunday's wedding was the first time a marriage had been led by a robot, according to manufacturer Kokoro Co. "Please lift the bride's veil,'' the robot said in a tinny voice, waving its arms in the air as the newlyweds kissed in front of about 50 guests.

The wedding took place at a restaurant in Hibiya Park in central Tokyo, where the I-Fairy wore a wreath of flowers and directed a rooftop ceremony. Wires led out from beneath it to a black curtain a few feet away, where a man crouched and clicked commands into a computer. 

Link between Mobile Phone and Brain Cancer

Cell phone users worried about getting brain cancer aren't off the hook yet.

A major international study into the link between cell phone use and two types of brain cancer has proved inconclusive, according to a report due to be published in a medical journal on Tuesday.

A 10-year survey of almost 13,000 participants found most cell phone use didn't increase the risk of developing meningioma -- a common and frequently benign tumor -- or glioma -- a rarer but deadlier form of cancer. 


There were ``suggestions'' that using cell phones for more than 30 minutes each day could increase the risk of glioma, according to the study by the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer. But the authors added that ``biases and error prevent a causal interpretation'' that would directly blame radiation for the tumor.

Longer call times appeared to pose a greater risk than the number of calls made, the study found. 

Low Attention in kids due to Pesticides

A new study of US health data reveals that children's attention-deficit disorder is due exposure to common pesticides used on fruits and vegetables. 

While the study couldn't prove that pesticides used in agriculture contribute to childhood learning problems, experts said the research is persuasive. "I would take it quite seriously," said Virginia Rauh of Columbia University, who has studied prenatal exposure to pesticides and wasn't involved in the new study.

Children may be especially prone to the health risks of pesticides as they're still growing and they may consume more pesticide residue than adults relative to their body weight.

In the body, pesticides break down into compounds that can be measured in urine. Almost universally, the study found detectable levels: The compounds turned up in the urine of 94% of the children. The kids with higher levels had increased chances of having ADHD, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, a common problem that causes students to have trouble in school.

The kids may have eaten food treated with pesticides, breathed it in the air or swallowed it in their drinking water. Experts said it's likely children who don't live near farms are exposed through what they eat.

As Ash Cloud Advances the British Airports are getting Affected

Europe's busiest airport was set to close early Monday morning as a dense crowd of volcanic ash drifts across England from Iceland, aviation authorities said.

The airspace over London's Heathrow Airport will be closed at 1 a.m. Monday (0000 GMT; 7 p.m. EDT), Britain's National Air Traffic Service said in a statement late Sunday night.

The restrictions affecting Heathrow — as well as Gatwick, Stansted, and London City airports - will be in place until at least 7 a.m. Monday, the aviation authority said.

Airports across Britain and Ireland were closed for much of Sunday because of the drifting ash. The shifting of the no-fly zone southward will allow airports in northern England — including the key cities of Manchester and Liverpool — to reopen after 1 a.m.

In Ireland, Dublin's international airport closed early Sunday evening until at least 12 p.m. Monday (1100 GMT, 7 a.m. EDT). Some airports in Ireland's west were closed and will reopen at different times Monday, but Shannon and southern Cork were open "until further notice."

German authorities sent up two test flights Sunday to measure the ash cloud, one from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and the other from Lufthansa, the country's biggest airline.

The DLR plane flew to southern England then continued north, collecting data from between 10,000 to 23,000 feet (3,000 to 7,000 meters). The Lufthansa Airbus A340-600, equipped with special scientific gear, left Frankfurt to fly over northern Germany, the United Kingdom and parts of Scandinavia.

All the data from both flights was immediately sent to aviation authorities in the U.K, the Netherlands and Germany, said aerospace center spokesman Andreas Schuetz.

In southern Iceland, activity at the volcano fluctuated Sunday but did not get more intense, civil protection official Agust Gunnar Gylfason said. He blamed the closures on shifting winds.

"What really changes the situation is the weather pattern," he said.

The Icelandic weather service said "presently there are no indications that the eruption is about to end."

"The closing of Manchester airspace once again is beyond a joke," Branson said in a statement. He said test flights have "shown no evidence that airlines could not continue to fly completely safely."

British Airways, facing cabin crew strikes beginning Tuesday, said it had canceled a small number of flights out of Manchester. The airline's chief executive, Willie Walsh, is to meet with British Transport Secretary Philip Hammond on Monday.

Eurostar, which runs trains between Britain and continental Europe, said it was adding four extra trains — an additional 3,500 seats — between London and Paris on Monday.

Google admits its wi-fi data collection blunder

Google has admitted that for the past three years it has wrongly collected information people have sent over unencrypted wi-fi networks.The is a issue came to picture after German authorities asked to audit the data the company's Street View cars gathered as they took photos viewed on Google maps.

Google said during a review it found it had "been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open networks". This will increase concerns about potential privacy breaches.

In a blogpost Google said as soon as it became aware of the problem it grounded its Street View cars from collecting wi-fi information and segregated the data on its network.

It is now asking for a third party to review the software that caused the problem and examine precisely what data had been gathered.

"Maintaining people's trust is crucial to everything we do, and in this case we fell short," wrote Alan Eustace, senior vice president of engineering and research.

"The engineering team at Google works hard to earn your trust - and we are acutely aware that we failed badly here."

Spain under high pressure to Curb Digital Piracy

In the last decade, a surge of music and movie sharing online in Spain has thrilled fans, but it has also increased pressure from as far away as Hollywood to clamp down. Spanish lawmakers are expected to vote this year on a measure that would allow the swift closing of sites suspected of facilitating file-sharing.


The people who are trying to sell the movies and music are a lot less enthusiastic. Sony Pictures Entertainment warned in March that it was considering halting altogether the sale of its DVDs in Spain.


“Spain is a very young democracy, a country where rock songs got censored until 1978, so we’re still going through adolescence in relation to intellectual property,” said the Spanish rock singer known as Loquillo. “But we cannot get stuck in a fight between authors and Internet users while, much more importantly, our music industry is allowed to disappear or gets absorbed by outsiders.”