Scientists in Europe are working on a project that could allow children and robots to become ‘friends’.

Robots can help children in all sorts of ways, by assisting with everything from school work and cookery to play. While at the moment, children may grow fond of robot companions, the robots themselves can’t build up a bond with the youngsters over time.

The ALIZ-E project looks to change that by developing “the theory and practice behind embodied cognitive robots capable of maintaining believable any-depth affective interactions with a young user over an extended and possibly discontinuous period of time.”

The EU-funded project is looking to increase human-robot interaction timeframes from mere minutes to a range of days. Non-verbal interaction will be a strong emphasis of the research, with robots adapting their behaviour to different user profiles.

ALIZ-E involves researchers from Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands and the UK, and while it’s unlikely to lead to robot-human marriages or anything so extreme in the near-term, if a robot can remember you, and over a number of days develop its interactions with you, it’s a step closer to creating artificially intelligent ’beings’ that really are our friends.

Do we really want that? Some may be creeped out by the idea, while others who are alone on Valentine’s Day may feel strangely comforted by it.

Ahead of Mobile World Congress, Samsung has announced the forthcoming launch of the Galaxy Tab 2, a 7-inch-screened sequel to its popular Android tablet.

The new version of the original 7-inch Galaxy Tab sports Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) and a 1 GHz processor. It will be available in both WiFi and WiFi+3G models. The 3G option offers HSPA＋ 21Mbps speeds, where supported. The screen is a WSVGA 1024×600 PLS TFT.

As you’d expect, the usual suite of Samsung apps is included, such as Music Hub, Readers Hub and Games Hub. A new Video Hub will offer over 1,000 film titles for purchase or rent, plus reviews, trailers and recommendations.

Also new with the Galaxy Tab 2 is AllShare Play, a content-sharing service that allows users to play or live-stream multimedia content on their tablet from PCs, Samsung smart devices as well as third-party cloud storage service, although Samsung isn’t saying which ones as yet. The company says that users will also be able to transfer content from the tablet to other devices or directly to Web services.

The Galaxy Tab 2 will be available from next month, although it’s unclear which markets will get it first. We expect that we’ll have a chance to go hands-on with it in two weeks, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. You can peruse the device’s full specs in Samsung’s announcement.

Yesterday  I published a piece about Newry in Northern Ireland, which is looking to help boost its economy by encouraging a startup ecosystem. A little later, a post entitled ‘You will not be the next Silicon Valley, please stop trying‘ appeared over on Pando Daily, in which the author decided pull a bunch of Irish stereotypes out of the bag to attack the idea.

Now, I could detail everything that’s wrong with the article, but the comments there do a perfect job of ripping it apart. It certainly missed the point of what’s happening in Newry. Indeed, if Trevor Gilbert, author of the Pando Daily piece, had looked beyond the Emerald Valley incubator’s name he’d see that in no way is it trying to be the next Silicon Valley. It would be unrealistic to suggest that any location has a chance of replicating the startup ecosystem in northern California – at least for a few generations.

Why should people stop trying to build the next Silicon Valley, though? What is Silicon Valley if it’s not a strong, established, sustainable ecosystem with generations of successful entrepreneurs? Why would anyone not want that?

Now, it’s easy to get caught up in ‘The next Silicon Valley!’ hype when someone is trying to sell stakeholders on a bid to encourage tech startups to move in to an area. Selling yourself as that is the route to disappointment and disillusionment when Ron Conway hasn’t booked a flight to your provincial industrial estate within three years. However, successful startup hubs around the world don’t try to copy Silicon Valley – they look at what it has done and modify it to local circumstances.

Nothing stays the same forever

In the past 18 months, I’ve visited cities like Berlin and Copenhagen where significant clusters of startups and investors are starting to emerge. I’ve been to Tel Aviv, which is probably currently the world’s greatest startup city outside of California – it’s successful but still has holes it knows it needs to fill, particularly in terms of a strong local investor network. I’ve also visited places further east, like Kiev and Romania, where things are a generally a little further behind, but there are people there who know what needs to be done.

In all of these places, they know that a combination of local talent from well-resourced universities, a network of informed angel investors and VCs, and startups with a strong vision and the ambition to build big disruptive businesses, are all factors they need to have in place if they want to become a greater force on the world stage.

These places are learning from Silicon Valley, and while they’re not claiming they ever will beat the place they’re inspired by, they might do - it may take 50 years, but to say that Silicon Valley is the undisputed technology capital of the world forever is naive to say the least.

Detroit used to be a motor industry boom town and is now in decline. The city I grew up in, Bradford was at the centre of the world’s wool trade at one point, but it’s full of second-hand mobile phone stores and ‘Everything for a pound!’ shops now.

The fortunes of locations rise and locations fall. So, while Berlin, London, Copenhagen, Kiev or even Newry might not have a chance of being a new Silicon Valley tomorrow, next year or in ten years, they shouldn’t stop trying, because nothing stays the same forever.

The small city of Newry isn’t the kind of place you’d expect to find a thriving startup hub with a global profile, but that’s exactly what it could become if one highly ambitious woman and her team have their way.

Newry is in Northern Ireland; part of the UK, on the border with the Republic of Ireland. Its location made it a flashpoint during the Troubles – the conflict between the Catholic and Protestant communities in the country between the 1960s and 1998. While those days are largely behind it, the region still faces considerable challenges, not least rising youth unemployment and a strong reliance on public funding. However, there’s hope in the form of Emerald Valley, a new initiative launched in the city which has big plans to turn Newry around.

Emerald Valley is, in essence, an incubator. It offers startups a place to work closely with others, helps them find the right support and focuses on “nurturing, encouraging and growing the entrepreneurs of tomorrow.” With seven startups now at home in the facility, it’s already heading towards full capacity.

The startups include a mix of local companies and some from Silicon Valley that have set up a base there; but why Newry? It’s hardly the hive of tech activity you’ll find an hour’s drive down the road in Dublin, where companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter have presences.

Paul Graham (not Mr Y Combinator) of location-based commerce startup Phlok says that Dublin has largely priced itself out of the startup market thanks to the large salaries that the Internet giants there can pay. Graham has based himself at Emerald Valley to harness the talent in the nearby technology college, in addition to the support that the incubator offers.

Aaron Gibson of Yumpod is a born entrepreneur, who got the bug when he renovated a bike and sold it at a profit at the age of 8. He hasn’t been tempted to take his company to Dublin, London or elsewhere as he has faith in Newry’s trajectory. “I don’t think there’s much point of moving out of somewhere that’s starting to grow so rapidly. It’s better staying here when you know it’s going to be so big in the future.”

Meanwhile, early-stage Silicon Valley startups Kallsafe and Awayonbiz relocated to Newry not only for the proximity of Dublin but the beauty of the area. Its tree-lined hills and historic river (where Saint Patrick is said to have planted a Yew tree) ooze Irish charm that is irresistible to many Americans.

The woman with the vision

Emerald Valley was founded by Nichola Bates, who had a vision to build a tech community in Newry, which is already home to First Derivatives, a successful, publicly traded company that serves the capital markets industry around the world. Newry also benefits from being well-connected to the Internet via fast fibre optic cable connections that run through the city and being situated between Dublin and the Northern Ireland capital, Belfast.

Bates moved to Newry from Belfast and was surprised to find a lack of any technology community, despite First Derivatives employing 250 developers in the city. In an attempt to develop a more active scene, she organised Bizcamp Newry, which featured talks from figures in the worlds of business, entrepreneurship and digital media. “People said no-one would come to Newry and that it would be a flop, but we had over 100 people on our first time so it was clear that there was something there, and that’s where it started.”

For the past two years, Bates has been investigating how to build an ecosystem in Newry that can take advantage of its proximity to Dublin but offer the benefits of being based in the UK, such as tax credits for research and development, and a startup visa that allows companies to relocate to easily the country. One of the key things that was missing was a central location to serve as a focal point for the city’s technology scene, and with private investment from American investor Eve Earley, Emerald Valley officially opened its doors last month.

Bates says that the word ‘Incubator’ is over-used and under-delivered upon, but she wants Emerald Valley to be different. For example, she meets with each startup each month to review their progress and identify where they’re not pushing themselves hard enough. Emerald Valley aims to be a place where startups can develop, and learn the skills they need to be successful.

Turning the city around

Now that Emerald Valley is full, what next? “Now it’s a case of knuckling down and making the startups that we have really successful. Our focus over the next twelve months is getting out there to the world and taking our startups by the hand and saying ‘Come on guys, we need people to know that you’re here.’ We need to start raising them significant amounts of money to grow them, so that we can fill our building, fill the next building, build a city. It’s a huge plan.”

Emerald Valley has room for four more startups in its current premises, and its next step involves a 500,000 square foot property on a local industrial estate.

Bates’ ambition extends way beyond attracting a few startups to Newry – she wants to help turn the town around. “It’s a wee bit mad but I don’t think it’s totally insane,” she says. Emerald Valley wants to engage with deprived parts of the community to show them that entrepreneurship is an accessible, achievable goal.

The building will host CoderDojo coding classes for young people, to introduce them to the idea of building software and Web products. Meanwhile, building successful, high-growth companies in the city will have a wider positive economic effect.

Public funding: Welfare for the middle class?

Bates is resolute that Emerald Valley should be a completely private enterprise with no public money involved. She says that this is something that has been met with resistance from the public sector, which feels that it should be funding such projects.

“What happens in Northern Ireland is that the minute you take the (public funding) soup, they own you and the focus completely changes.” Bates describes public funding as ‘welfare for the middle class’, and says that companies can become addicted to it, and constrained by the conditions it imposes.

“A number of the public sector organisations around us are very uncomfortable and feel that we’re in competition with them. But I’m free – there’s no handcuffs on me, there’s no muzzle. I can say exactly what needs to be said without anybody saying ‘Well, we’ll just pull your funding.’ What I offer is entirely a commercial model.”

Keep an eye on Newry

While Newry is still a long way from being one of Europe’s key startup hubs, in Nichola Bates it has a figurehead with the guts and drive to make it happen. Bates admits that the coming year is crucial in proving that her vision can yield solid results, and  we’ll definitely be keeping an eye on Emerald Valley’s progress in 2012.

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Pinterest is spamming your Facebook friends’ email with fake connection requests: Read more

Sources say the US is going to approve Google’s purchase of Motorola Mobility: Read more 

Apple is rushing to finalize apps for onstage iPad 3 demos and commercials: Read more

If you live outside the US, you’ll probably put this in the “Well, obviously” category, but it’s good to find a study that makes it clear – the Hollywood movie industry’s habit of spacing out releases of films in different territories is a primary cause of revenues lost to online piracy.

As TorretFreak notes, the study from the University of Minnesota and Wellesley College, titled ‘Reel Piracy: The Effect of Online Film Piracy on International Box Office Sales’, notes that “Longer release windows are associated with decreased box office returns… our findings indicate that, as a lower bound, international box office returns in our sample were at least 7% lower than they would have been in the absence of pre-release piracy.”

It continues: “By contrast, we do not see evidence of elevated sales displacement in US box office revenue following the adoption of BitTorrent, and we suggest that delayed legal availability of the content abroad may drive the losses to piracy.”

So, according to this study, US box office revenue (where Hollywood movies tend to be released first) isn’t affected by piracy, and delayed releases elsewhere are what causes lost box office revenue.

The downloadable report, marked as a draft not for academic citation, notes that the movie industry has indeed reduced delayed international releases from an average of 10.5 weeks in 2004 to 4 weeks in 2010. The increase in digital cinema technology, where films can be distributed on easily duplicatable hard discs, has made this more practical than in the past, where a limited quantity of prints of a movie on film created a physical limit on the number of simultaneous screens a title could be run on.

The report concludes that “Studios should continue to reduce the length of the release lag, particularly for genres that are more heavily pirated such as science fiction and action films.”

While it’s an obvious argument, it does send a message to the movie industry that factors in its control are key to reducing a major cause of lost revenue, rather than the unpopular and messy legal action and lobbying that has characterised the MPAA in recent years.

Television is hurtling rapidly towards an online future – from watching shows on-demand on computers and mobile devices, to bringing apps and interactive experiences to the largest screen in the house. What exactly will that future look like? To find out, MIPCube next month should be an essential mark on your calendar.

With high-profile speakers, a startup competition and some of the world’s most innovative viral video and transmedia producers in attendance, this is set to help make sense of the shape that the future of TV will take.

Sessions lined up in the busy programme include ’How to rewire television for the new world order’, ‘Why today’s rising star would rather make it big on YouTube’, ‘Creating new wave cinema 2.0 with the Web techs’, and a look at how Microsoft’s Kinect is helping to bring motion and TV together. Speakers in attendance will include Twitter’s UK General Manager, Tony Wang and Allen DeBevoise of next-generation video entertainment network Machinima.

Exposing new talent

Meanwhile, MIPCube Content 360 will see digital creatives pitch new ideas relating to cross-media content and next-generation audience engagement via TV, Internet, social media and mobile applications, personalisation, viral content, social games and other digital applications. Three finalists will be awarded €5,000 each to create pilots to compete for the award. If you’d like to apply, the deadline for entries is 24 February.

MIPCube Lab is a startup competition that’s looking for the most promising, disruptive TV startup of the year. Whether it’s a new business model, an app or a technological solution, finalists will pitch and network with media VCs and strategic partners at MIPCube, so it’s well worth applying. You can find full details here.

We’ll be there – will you?

MIPCube takes place in Cannes, France on 30 and 31 March, right before MIPTV, the well-established TV industry event, so it’s a great time to network with some of the industry’s most influential figures.

Always keeping our eye on the future of media, The Next Web will be in attendance, reporting just as we did during the Midem music industry conference last month.

Established mainstream media models are being swept aside and it makes sense to stay on top of the changes. If you’d like to be at MIPCube too, you can register here, with special rates for startups and students.

We think they’ve pretty much nailed most of these, although Pando Daily’s ‘Techie tree huggers’ raised an eyebrow. As a The Next Web reader, congratulations – you’re a ‘true Web lover’.

If you enjoyed this, try Tech tabloids you are lucky don’t exist.

Back in August 2009, we reported on how the entire Pirate Bay could be downloaded in one 21.3GB file. At the time, we thought it was small – but now, as TorrentFreak reports, the notorious site has now been crammed into a truly minuscule 90MB zip file.

The file, which unzips to 164MB, contains the title, ID, file size, seeds, leechers and magnet links of 1,643,194 torrents from the site, although comments were removed to keep the download as small as possible.

With filesharing sites like Megaupload and Ukraine’s ex.ua being shut down of late, it wouldn’t be surprising to see The Pirate Bay in the sights of the authorities, even though its founders have recently had an appeal against their prison sentences and fines rejected in Sweden. Having all the torrents on the site backed up means that were it to be taken down, multiple clones could spring up quickly.

TorrentFreak says that the copy was created by Pirate Bay user ‘allisfine’, who created a script to back up the site, meaning that fresh updates could be made regularly. The tiny size is made possible by the site’s recent switch to Magnet links in place of Torrent files.

Berlin-based EyeEm is keen to make sure you know that it’s not another Instagram clone, and the launch today of its API should help get that message across.

While EyeEm lets you take photos, add filters and share them to your social networks (sound familiar?), the key difference here is context. When you publish a photo, you’re encouraged to tag it with not only a location but with what you’re doing, too. This allows EyeEm to be able to compile themed collections of photos based around activities, events and locations automatically. As a result, for example, you can easily see all the photos of people playing the same sport, at a particular event, or all the photos taken in the same city, right within the app.

The new API allows developers to harness these feeds of photos for their own apps and services. EyeEm launched last summer and released a revamped app, which emphasised its key difference from the competition, in December 2011. While CEO Florian Meissner won’t give out any figures on user numbers, he says that the December relaunch boosted engagement around the app, and exploring at the photos shared on EyeEm, it seems that it’s certainly managed to break out of the ‘Berlin bubble’ to some extent.

The API is read-only at the moment, although the ability to post photos to EyeEm from third party apps is in the pipeline – something that Instagram seems opposed to. The API currently offers access to user photos, albums, favourites, likes and comments, as well as topics and photo tags by city, country, venue and by event.

The API’s launch precedes the upcoming Photo Hack Day in Berlin. This will see developers creating apps and services with popular photo-related APIs and beyond. As an example of what might come out of the event, Meissner suggests an app that identifies songs using Shazam and then creates a themed photo gallery for it from EyeEm photos.

Photo Hack Day is hosted by EyeEm in partnership with iStockPhoto, and if you’re in Berlin on 25 and 26 February and want to take part, you can find out more here.