Info Around You

British interactive gaming company NetPlay TV Plc posted a wider pretax loss for the full year 2009, mainly hurt by one-off costs and higher operating expenses, but said it expected to benefit from Google TV.

The company said it expected Google TV - a service that will bring the web to television screens by the autumn of 2010 - to open up online gambling to millions of more players.

NetPlay, which undertook a transformation from a mobile content business to an interactive TV gaming business in 2007, said it made an earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization of 0.2 million pounds ($293,800) in the first quarter of 2010.



For the year ended Dec. 31, 2009, the company said its pretax loss widened to 11.1 million pounds from 1.0 million pounds in 2008.

Revenue grew 9 percent to 21.6 million pounds, while cost of sales rose 32 percent to 17.0 million pounds.

The company invested heavily in technology and partnered with media channels like Virgin Media Television, Channel Five and ITV1 following Ofcom's ruling in June last year allowing terrestrial broadcasters to air transactional gaming shows.

"We are confident that initiatives such as Google TV, will have a significant, positive impact on our growth potential," non-executive chairman Clive Jones said in a statement.

Cancer could claim 13.3 million lives a year by 2030, the World Health Organisation's cancer research agency said on Tuesday, almost double the 7.6 million deaths from the illness in 2008.

A new calculation tool by the International Agency for Research on Cancer forecast that in 2030, new cases of cancer would soar to 21.3 million, and that 13.3 million people would die from the disease.

Freddie Bray, a scientist in charge of the study on 27 types of cancer, said that in 2008, 56 percent of the 12.7 million new cancer cases and 63 percent of 7.6 million cancer deaths occurred in developing countries.

The latest data indicated that lung cancer was the most common type of cancer, while breast and colorectal cancer were the next most common forms of the illness in 2008.

The highest numbers of fatal cases were posted by countries with the largest populations, such as China, India and the United States.

In terms of proportion, North America, western Europe and Australia had the highest mortality rates.

Bray said that this stemmed from consumption patterns of rich nations after the second World War, such as tobacco usage.

However, with tobacco consumption now growing in developing countries, mortality rates for lung cancer were also expected to grow in the 21st century, the experts said.