If you are of the opinion that two screens are better than one, I come bearing good news. LG’s new DoublePlay smartphone has today been made available at T-Mobile.

We first got a peek at the device back in June, though we were pretty uncertain on details at that point. Then a leaked T-Mo roadmap shed some light, which leads us to today’s official launch. The LG DoublePlay’s claim to fame are its dual screens — one 3.5-inch primary screen, with a 2-inch secondary screen landing square in the middle of its split QWERTY keyboard.

The screens can work in tandem on a single task, or can be used separately to, say, update your Facebook and send a text at the same time. The DoublePlay touts a 1GHz Snapdragon processor and runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread. You’ll find a 5-megapixel camera on the back, equipped with LED flash, auto focus, and the ability to capture 720p video. Unfortunately, there’s no front-facing cam for the DoublePlay, so hopefully multi-tasking is more important to potential buyers than video chat.

LG understands that not everyone enjoys QWERTY keyboards, and has preloaded the Swype application along with T-Mobile’s Group Text and Cloud Text services.

We originally thought the DoublePlay would go for $149 on-contract (courtesy of that leaked roadmap), but it would seem that the phone gods are in a good mood today. The LG DoublePlay will retail for $99 on a new two-year contract, and is ready to be picked up at a T-Mobile store today.

The popular social gaming network for Android, PapayaMobile, is announcing today that it’s now expanding its gaming platform to iOS. The company is making its social development toolkits available to iOS developers as a beta release, allowing them to connect users on both platforms (iOS and Android) for in-game features including challenges, game invites, leaderboards and more.

In addition, developers who have built their social games using Papaya’s Social Game Engine can now export both iOS and Android versions of their game from a single code base, the company says.

To kick off the iOS support, several third-party game developers will bring their new games to the Papaya network in the coming weeks as iOS releases. The current list of expected games includes X-City by Aidi Game, Contagion by 2Clams and Burger Joint by Arctic Empire. All developers will also have access to PapayaMobile's recently launched Gateway to China program, which localizes, distributes and promotes Western games in the Chinese market.

Earlier this summer, Papaya announced it had reached 25 million users – 940% growth since the beginning of last year. The growth was attributed to the ever-increasing size of the Android market. Now, the company says it has over 30 million users. And all this before it hits the iPhone.

PapayaMobile raised $18 million in a Series B round led by Chinese venture firm Keytone Ventures and DCM this April, bringing Papaya's total funding to $22 million. Last week, the company announced, too, that it will be one of the first startups to receive an investment from DCM’s A-Fund.

The $100 million Asian A-Fund is intended to support early-stage startups focused on Android. DCM partnered with gaming giant Tencent, Japan's largest mobile gaming social network GREE and Japan's second largest mobile operator KDDI, to fund the startups, each which will receive anywhere from $250,000 to $5 million.

In June Justin.tv launched one of its first verticals, TwitchTV, a live-streamed video game portal and community for gamers. The platform has since taken off in terms of usage, and today, TwitchTV is expanding to the iPhone.

For background, TwitchTV features competitions of a variety of games and platforms with top gamers, tournaments and commentary. The platform aims to be a one-stop-shop for live video for ‘eSports,’ which Justin.tv says is synonymous with competitive video gaming. TwitchTV features live video game battles and commentary from titles like Halo:Reach, Starcraft II, World Of Warcraft, Call Of Duty: Black Ops and others.

With the new free iOS app, you can watch all of the content on the site. Users can watch videos in High Definition in full landscape mode; and browse by game, featured and more. You can also follow your favorite channels directly from the video stream, and see a list of the channels you follow that are broadcasting live. Plus, you can chat with your friends on the video stream via in-app chat.

Considering the success of TwitchTV on web platforms, it should be interesting to see if the gaming site can build a base of users on mobile.

Sports+ (formerly Hitpost) has launched a new iPad app for sports fans that features socially-powered feeds for every league, team and player you care to follow. These feeds include latest news, crowd-generated stories, and polls.

Hitpost’s apps allow you to follow your teams, players and leagues to get a comprehensive view into photos, Tweets, user-uploaded reports and news coming out of an organization. Currently Sports+ has 250,000 mobile users on its iPhone and Android apps.

The iPad app’s Feeds are updated 24-7 by these users, and the feed also includes crowd-curated news and blog posts from sports writers, and tweets from professional athletes. The iPhone and Android apps also allow users to make and share their own sports poll using a live professional sideline photo.

Sports+’s apps have seen a high rate of growth recently. The app’s usage grew 300% last month, and 2 out of 3 new mobile users use the app again the next day. Hitpost is backed by a number of high-profile angels and investors including Keith Rabois, Shervin Pishevar, Naval Ravikant, Khosla Ventures and RRE Ventures.

Foodies rejoice! ZipList, makers of online and mobile shopping lists and a recipe search service, is out now with a completely revamped iPhone application. The updated app syncs with ZipList.com and its 40 parter sites, including MarthaStewart.com, Women’s Day, $5 Dinners and more, to keep your mobile shopping list up-to-date with your latest recipe finds from across the Web.

With the new app, the user interface has been redesigned for easier in-store use. You can now easily navigate the app with one hand, and find recipes that have are uniquely targeted towards your own personal likes and interests while shopping.

Although there are other shopping lists apps out there, for foodies and home chefs, the standout feature for ZipList’s app is the recipe search and recommendations feature. Thanks to ZipList’s use of natural language processing, the app is smart enough to know the difference between an ingredient you need to buy for your recipe (e.g., a cut of meat or produce item) versus a staple ingredient you probably have on hand back home (e.g., salt).

The idea to update the app came from extensive customer feedback and research, says Nick Dellis, VP of Business Development and Marketing at ZipList. The company found that people would see an item on sale in the store – for example, chicken breasts – and would want to be able to quickly find a recipe they could use for that night’s dinner. This functionality is now integrated into the mobile app so customers can stand in the middle of the grocery aisle and search for a recipe they like.

What’s different about ZipList is that the service learns from you the more you use it. It begins to understand what sorts of recipes you like and who your favorite chefs are, based on your behavior, the ingredients you purchase, the prep and cook time of the meals you choose and more. If you never add recipes with meat to your shopping list, for example, ZipList learns that you’re probably a vegetarian, and will stop suggesting recipes for meat dishes.

The new app also has an improved store locator functionality that includes access to 150,000 stores across the U.S. (and others, via crowd-sourcing). After adding a store, you can now re-order the aisles, which is a bit time-consuming, but worth doing if you’re a regular ZipList user.

ZipList includes standard shopping list features like sharing, barcode scanning, checklists and more.  The updated app is now available in iTunes as a free download.

To date, ZipList has raised $4.5 million in funding from Softbank and Martha Stewart Omnimedia.

Online store and backup service provider Backblaze this morning released version 2.0 of its flagship product, bumping up the allowed file size for storage and backups up to ‘unlimited’ and bringing other enhancements to the table.

The company has actually always provided unlimited storage – and “unthrottled bandwidth” – for five bucks a month, but now vows to make its unlimited offering even more unlimited. That’s right, boys and girls, infinite is the new unlimited.

Here’s a list of the main new features and improvements in Backblaze 2.0:

• Unlimited file size (up from 9 GB)
• Backup any file type
• Backup VMWare and Virtual Machines
• Restore to 1TB external drive (up from 500 GB)
• Added Automatic Throttle to maximize the efficiency of uploading of your connection

There are other enhancements, mainly in terms of speed and performance, but maybe you should just give it a whirl.

New customers, trials, and new installs by existing customers will automatically get Backblaze 2.0. Current customers and free trials will be automatically upgraded over the next few weeks (although users can ‘check for updates’ right now).

Backblaze customers that update from an existing version will keep the settings they have on their current installation.

If you want to learn more about who and how Backblaze can offer this at a relatively low price (if you pay for 1 year, it’s actually only about $4 per month), you should read Devin’s earlier story.

On a sidenote: I enjoyed re-reading an article about Backblaze I wrote a while ago: Online Backup Startup Backblaze Was Almost Bought. Twice. What Went Wrong?

There is no shortage of Nokia news this morning. The struggling Nordic giant is trying to stage a comeback with a bevy of new products—everything from Windows phones to lower-end models. But maybe it is trying to do too much.

Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey has some advice for the company, which he delivers via a Tweet: “you make too many products. Focus on 3.”

It’s a very Steve Jobs piece of advice, who famously said, “Focus is about saying No.”. Recall that when Jobs returned to Apple he cleaned up the mess at the then almost bankrupt company by simplifying its product line into four things Apple did really well: desktop, portable, consumer, pro. If a product didn’t fit in one of those boxes, it was killed.

Dorsey too is a proponent of minimalism. After all, he did invent Twitter. But even at Square, it’s all about editing down the product. Nokia takes more of a market segmentation approach. It wants to please everyone, and ends up pleasing no one.

Maybe somewhere out there, a diehard Motorola and Android fan has patiently been waiting for the LTE edition of the Xoom. He’s stuck it out, not wanting to buy the 3G Xoom and eventually having to send it back to Motorola for its LTE transplant. He’s been waiting for the complete package. Well, nearly eight months to the day after the Xoom first hit the market, Motorola finally introduced the Xoom 4G LTE and it’s available from Verizon.

It only comes in the 32GB flavor and carries a price of $669 or, with a two year Verizon contract, $499. But everything else is the same as the original. A 1GHz Tegra 2 powers the Honeycomb 3.2 operating system. But this time around, it packs the goods right out of the box to jump onto Verizon’s speedy LTE network.

This release fulfills the destiny of the Xoom. It was originally supposed to be the first Honeycomb LTE tablet but launched sans the necessary hardware. Motorola promised free upgrades but constantly pushed back the launch date simultaneously aggravating early adopters and allowing the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 to earn the title as the first LTE tab. Finally, last month, seven months after the Xoom was released, Motorola made good and started accepting Xooms for the LTE upgrade. Better later than never.

Despite a couple big-name companies like Groupon and Zynga lining up for IPOs, the demand for private company stock on alternative exchanges keeps rising. Private stock transactions on SecondMarket in the first three quarters of 2011 totaled $435 million, a 73 percent increase over the same period last year. In the third quarter alone, there were $167 million worth of transactions on SecondMarket, up 49 percent from the second quarter.

Who is buying all of these shares? SecondMarket breaks it out in its third quarter report. Wealthy “accredited individuals” made up the largest share of buyers (63 percent by dollar amount), followed by asset managers (22.3 percent of transactions), hedge funds (7.8 percent), and venture capital funds (5.1 percent). VC funds became much more active on SecondMarket in the quarter, accounting for 17.5 percent of the transactions by number. Last quarter, VCs made up less than 1 percent of transactions (and only 0.2 percent by dollar amount).

On the seller’s side, former employees made up the bulk of completed transactions (64.5 percent). But current employees took the No.2 spot with 16.9 percent of transactions , nearly quadruple the 4.4 percent of transactions they represented in the second quarter. The number of transactions with investors selling doubled to 8.4 percent, signaling that secondary markets are becoming a more accepted liquidity valve for current employes and shareholders. Founders represented the smallest amount of transactions, at 3.6 percent, but that is up from 1.9 percent last quarter.

SecondMarket also tracks the “most watched” companies on its service, which is an indication of investor interest. The most watched companies didn’t change from last quarter: (Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, Zynga, Foursquare, Dropbox, etc.). But there is a new group of “rising stars.” These include Turntable, Jetsetter, and Klout. And then bubbling up just below the rising stars are the “newbies”: Pinterest, Billfloat, Firstwind, Proofpoint, and Zaarly. Hmm, is there a correlation between how much press a company gets and interest on SecondMarket?

Microsoft-owned Skype is releasing a new version of its SkypeKit, which allows Skype calls, instant messaging, video chat and other features to be integrated by developers into consumer electronics. As Skype writes in its announcement today, the company opened up SkypeKit to the public in June to ‘accelerate Skype’s presence in the consumer electronics industry.’ Today, Skype is releasingthe Developer Preview of SkypeKit 4.02, which extends funcionaluty include desktop applications.

Developers can integrate Skype into their Windows, Mac and Linux desktop applications via SkypeKit for Desktop, which adds native Skype functionality directly into partner applications or via the Skype Desktop API, which allows developers to extend the functionality of Skype for Windows, Skype for Mac and Skype for Linux.

For the first time, Skype is releasing Video APIs to the new SkypeKit for Desktop. These Video APIs will allow developers to add video calling to desktop apps. For now, Chris Andrews, Senior Business Development Manager at Skype says the the API only supports one-on-one video calling but group chat is on the roadmap.

Andrews says that potential products using the API could focus on specific Skype desktop apps for kids, or seniors. He adds that some partners who are using the Video APIs are focused on distance learning and telemedicine opportunities. For, now, there are no plans for a mobile API, he says.

Skype is also officially announcing its App Directory, which was soft launched in August. Skype has sorted both consumer apps and business apps that have been built of its APIs into groups by genre (call recording, video, desktop sharing etc.), and featured the top downloaded free and paid apps, top rated apps and the newest apps across the board and by genre.

For each app, Skype provides a landing page that gives more information about the application, release date, star rating and comments, features, requirements, screenshots and more. You can choose to download the app, and Skype will take you to the developer's landing page. Skype users can also search for apps by cost, language, keywords, OS and more.

Andrews says the focus of the app directory is discovery for developers and the company will do more promotion around the app directory and third-party apps in the future.

Social travel sharing/planning website Gtrot.com (short for 'globetrotting') is debuting a personalized city discovery service that aggregates travel recommendations from friends' social network updates into an interactive grid.

Founded by Brittany Laughlin and Zachary Smith, Gtrot helps users source travel plans, deals, tips, and recommendations from other friends via their social graph. For example, if you are visiting Paris and need travel advice, you can use Gtrot's Facebook app or site to see which of your friends have been or live there, so you can reach out to them to get personalized advice and recommendations.

With today’s update, the site has been redesigned to focus on city discovery. Simply enter the destination city, and gtrot's technology will parse data from Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and other sites to determine where your friends have been, what activities they took part in, their current location and more.

Gtrot will also recommends a curated set of places, deals and events, based on the information culled from the user's social networks. Recommendations are presented in a photo-grid that shows the friends who visited each venue, the source of deals, and events coinciding with the preferred travel dates. Users can save the items they want to include in their plans.

Gtrot recently raised funding from Lightbank.

We’re all ready to get a hefty helping of Ice Cream Sandwich, but some may wait longer than others. HTC is still firmly on the fence about details, while Motorola has promised Android 4.0 to the Droid RAZR in the first half of 2012.

Meanwhile, Nexus handset owners will be on a shorter waiting list, with the exception of the Nexus One. Unfortunately for owners of the original Google phone, Google has confirmed that the Nexus One is just “too old” for the new software. Google’s Product Management Director of Android Hugo Barra has confirmed that the Nexus S, on the other hand, will get a taste of Ice Cream Sandwich “within weeks.”

The Telegraph reports that Google hopes to get Android 4.0 out to the Nexus S just after the release of the Galaxy Nexus, an NFC-capable phone recently announced in Hong Kong. Then again, Nexus S owners can get an almost-complete version of Android 4.0 over at the XDA-Developer forums. Brave Nexus One owners can also find a flashable ROM of an Ice Cream Sandwich build in this thread.

Barra went on to discuss the various joys of Ice Cream Sandwich, taking the opportunity to strike back against Steve Ballmer’s blatant attack on the platform. Last week, Microsoft’s CEO said that Android “required a Computer Science degree” to use, which Barra unsurprisingly doesn’t agree with. “Android, especially this new version 4.0, is an incredibly intuitive platform – the best one we've ever built. There are power user features, but there is no need for an instruction manual or a computer science degree," Barra said.

There is always an element of the confessional about interviewing people, but I really felt like a priest when I interviewed MySpace co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe earlier this week. DeWolfe was keynoting San Francisco's FailCon conference and our conversation naturally focused on failure – and particularly, of course, the meteoric failure of MySpace.

Not that DeWolfe considers MySpace to be a failure. Arguing that the company pioneered the social media revolution, DeWolfe – who is now the founder and CEO of the online gaming network Mindjolt – clearly has learned much from his turbulent experience as MySpace CEO.  And yet one can't help suspecting that if DeWolfe had one wish, it would be to go back to June 2006, back to that now almost unimaginable moment when MySpace was the social network and it had just overtaken Google as the most visited website in the world.

This the second in a weeklong series of interviews about failure. Yesterday, Vinod Khosla confessed to me that he had experienced many more failures than successes in his seemingly illustrious career.

It’s been a long time coming but after a decade of slowly losing its way, I think Nokia is headed back from the land of the lost.

This is not to say that I think the two new Lumia phones will pull Nokia out of its doldrums. However, I think the company has finally made some bold, intelligent decisions and, like it or not, Windows Phone will save them over the next few years.

First, Nokia cut its losses. For most of this decade Nokia has been producing phones that people bought because, in short, there was little else available. Europe bought Nokia because it was local, useable, and, above all, cheap while Asia and America liked the phones but rarely saw them as available and affordable. Samsung started in on Nokia’s lunch and Apple finished it. Now Microsoft, pardon the extended metaphor, is going to have to serve up dinner or they’re toast.

By breaking with MeeGo and Symbian, Nokia has ensured that IT departments will look at Nokia phones seriously again. Windows Phone may not seem popular, but rest assured that once Windows 8 hits it will be an important part of the Microsoft ecosystem. As fanboyish as we are here, I well understand the impact of Windows on the tech landscape and once Windows 8 and Windows Phone merge, Nokia’s profile will improve immensely.

Second, Nokia has always built good hardware and the N9 and these two new phones are no different. Strong, metal casing, a bright touchscreen, and meticulous manufacturing standards have made Nokias the workhorses of the mobile age and these phones don’t stray from that.

Third, Nokia can grab Apple’s scraps – and RIM’s whole market share. There is still an untapped group of consumers that are looking for a smartphone but aren’t quite sure what to buy. Consider Nokia’s current subscriber base, at least in Europe – they’re not selling to young, plugged in professionals. Instead, they’re selling to folks who are already loyal to the brand and have had a Nokia cellphone since the days of the 8120. The smartphone revolution passed them by and, in the same way Samsung tried to capitalize on the “soccer mom” market with phones like the Windows Mobile-powered Blackjack, Nokia now has an untapped market. The difference, however, is the branding. Two familiar brands, Microsoft and Nokia, are better than one – RIM.

Nokia’s return isn’t guaranteed but if you can give Elop credit for anything it’s in giving the company a bit more time to turn around.

[Image: gosphotodesign/Shutterstock]

CrowdOptic, a maker of an augmented reality app and mobile analytics solutions for the enterprise, has raised $500,000 in new funding today in a round led by Bowman Capital. According to CEO Jon Fisher, CrowdOptic will use the new capital to accelerate development of products in the area of mobile-powered technology for live events as well as expand the security features of its platform.

For those unfamiliar with CrowdOptic, the company makes a platform that can detect where crowds are focused in real-time by triangulating their angle and bearing via the GPS and compass on users’ smartphones. It then applies algorithms to detect shifts or anomalies in the crowd’s attention patterns. A dashboard and alerts system can communicate with onsite security personnel when a possible threat is detected.

The platform also supports real-time advertising, broadcasting and communication during live events, including augmented reality displays. This is how CrowdOptic gets the crowd to use their smartphones in the first place – a cool augmented reality app. At a sporting event, for example, a fan might be able to point their phone at one of the players in order to get more info about them, like their stats, or they could receive messages sent out from the team to its fanbase.

Recently, CrowdOptic signed security services firm Andrews International onto its platform, and will now provide its technology to its 15,000 security personnel for use at the events it oversees. "WithCrowdOptic, we will be able to surveil the crowd and support our personnel with a stronger arsenal than onsite security cameras," Randy Andrews, CEO of Andrews International, said in a statement.

CrowdOptic is a privately held, venture-backed company based in San Francisco.

In what I think is an interesting experiment, CBS this morning debuted a “60 Minutes” application that you can find in and launch from the Chrome Web Store (which just got a major facelift).

Granted, “adding it to Chrome” doesn’t really do anything but take you to this page, which you can just open in Chrome just like you would any page, but the Web app does look pretty nice.

Powered by HTML5 and CSS3 animations, the Chrome app delivers high-quality video of “60 Minutes” program content, starting with the recently aired interview of Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs’s biographer. His book recently hit the stores, in case you hadn’t heard.

CBS says the app will also feature previous segments, clips, and new original content from the “60 Minutes” online series 60MinutesOvertime.com.

Users can browse segments by categories such as Newsmakers, Politics, Science, Business, Sports, Entertainment and Nature, as well as by correspondent.

TechCrunch readers may remember Brammo as the Oregon-based designer and manufacturer of all-electric motorcycles (and the battery technology and software that powers them), or as the makers of the bike one Mike Arrington was driving around the conference center at Disrupt NYC this year, whereupon he was almost removed from Disrupt by security. Later, in conjunction with Brammo CEO (And Disrupt Speaker) Craig Bramscher, Arrington gave the motorcycle away to one lucky mother of a marine.

Back in 2008, Brammo raised its first chunk of outside investment, an $11 million round led by Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital and Best Buy Venture Capital. Today, the electric vehicle technology company has added another significant piece of change to its vault, announcing the close of the final tranche of a $28 million series B round of financing.

Gigaom first reported the company’s close of the initial $12.5 million portion of its series B back in September 2010. Today marks the official close. For those still confused, Brammo has raised just under $40 million to date.

The final tranche of Brammo’s second round of investment was led by Polaris Industries and included contributions from existing investor, Alpine Energy, as well as first-time investor NorthPort Investments. Polaris, the manufacturer of snowmobiles, ATVs, and neighborhood electric vehicles, joins the Brammo team as a key strategic partner, providing the electric motorcycle maker with an opportunity to bring its drivetrain technology to new markets.

Bramscher told TechCrunch that he hopes Polaris can be to Brammo what Toyota has been for Tesla. For those unfamiliar, the CEO was referring to Tesla’s strategic partnership with Toyota (forged prior to Tesla’s IPO in May 2010) in which Toyota agreed to purchase $50 million in Tesla common stock, followed by an announcement that the two companies would collaborate to build an electric version of Toyota’s popular RAV4.

Through its new partnerships with the powersports leader as well as its manufacturing partner, Flextronics, Brammo is looking to synthesize powersports and innovative electronics to realize scale and kick its product development plans into fifth gear.

As to these powersport product development plans, Brammo has two super moto and off-road motorcycles (Engage and Encite) coming down the pipeline as well as a sport motorcycle called Empulse, which will add to its existing flagship product, the 2010 Electric Motorcycle of the Year, Enertia — an “urban commuter” motorcycle that runs about $8K per bike.

Furthermore, Bramscher said that its partnership with Polaris will enable the company to broaden its reach in product development, geographic scale, while Flextronics gives Brammo the ability to scale through supply chain optimization and high quality assembly (the company will soon begin producing Brammo Power battery packs), as well as access to design for manufacturing services.

The new round of funding marks a big win for the up-and-coming EV maker, and we’ll be looking forward to the release of these cool new green bikes soon, especially as Brammo looks to nose out fellow American competitors and all-EV makers, Zero Motorcycles and Mission Motors.

For more on Brammo, check ‘em out at home here.

Marketing technology company Fiksu’s data for the month of September shows the year’s biggest drop in application downloads, a trend it claims was impacted by mobile consumers holding out for the next Apple iPhone. Last month, the company speculated that a hiatus in sales of older iPhone models was impacting app downloads, and Apple’s recent admission of a drop of 3 million device sales last quarter appears to validate that claim.

The company publishes its Fiksu Indexes monthly to measure fluctuations in competition for rank in the app stores and the cost to acquire loyal users in order to help mobile app marketers benchmark their performance against industry averages.

In September, the Fiksu App Store Competitive Index, which measures the average aggregate daily download volume of the Top 200 free U.S. iPhone apps, dropped by 6% from 4.06 million downloads in August to 3.8 million. This is the largest decrease Fiksu has seen this year, since it began measuring app store trends in May.

Meanwhile, the Fiksu Cost per Loyal User Index, which measures the cost of user acquisition, increased last month. It went up by 10 cents to $1.64, a 6% jump from $1.54 in August. The company also saw a continued decline in organic iPhone app downloads during September (a 4% drop), though not as bad as in August (a 35% drop).

Organic downloads are those where people actively seek out new apps in the app store without first seeing an ad. The drop here could also have been somewhat impacted by the anticipation of the new iPhone, as consumers weren’t looking to download new apps to what would soon be their old iPhone.

Apparently “innocent until proven guilty” isn’t going to hold up well on the interwebs. At least not according to a group called Demand Progress, who claims that the upcoming House version of the PROTECT IP Act could offer even more power to the accuser. And even worse, sites like Twitter and YouTube may be under fire in no time at all.

The bill, which is a rewrite of the unpopular COICA bill, was passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee in May. Even in its original state, the bill seemingly contradicts this country’s assumption of innocence in many ways, allowing not only the Department of Justice, but private rightsholders to accuse a site of infringement and have it yanked with court approval. If the Department of Justice levels the charge (rather than a private rightsholder), the scope of the order extends past payment processors and ad networks to ISPs and search engines, thus requiring search engines to censor allegedly infringing sites out of their index.

Then, after the accused site has been through the ringer, the site can “petition the court to suspend or vacate the order.” Just in the nick of time, right? This, on its own, isn’t looking good, but Demand Progress claims that the House version may take things a step further in the wrong direction. According to the group, the new version will hold sites that host user-generated content liable for its users’ infringement.

That means if someone posts copyrighted content on YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook, the Department of Justice would have the right to hold the sites’ owners legally responsible, and even shut down service to the sites. If Demand Progress is accurate in its interpretation of the soon-to-be introduced House version of PROTECT IP, it will effectively overturn sections of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that protect ISPs and websites from being held responsible for content posted by their users.

PROTECT IP advocates claim that the new bill will protect U.S. consumers from foreign “rogue sites” which sell unapproved and potentially dangerous products, along with helping U.S. jobs by getting rid of sites that sell counterfeit products. That’s all well and good, but shouldn’t there be some concern over the ripple-effect consequences of such a disturbance in the tech sector?

Apparently, there is. The Consumer Electronics Association, the Computer and Communications Industry Association and NetCoalition on Monday sent a letter to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, reports PC World. “The technology industry is leading America out of the recession, and inadvertent damage to the tech sector could not happen at a worse time,” read the letter.

The original PROTECT IP Act summary:

EasyWeb Innovations, hereafter referred to as ‘EasyWeb’ or, alternatively, ‘some obscure patent troll looking to score coin by suing companies that actually innovate, rather than building and selling something’, has recently filed patent infringement lawsuits against social networking giants Facebook and Twitter. The suits claim EasyWeb holds five patents, with titles such as “Message Publishing System for Publishing Messages from Identified, Authorized Senders”.

Of note is the plaintiff’s lawyer, John Demarais, who is quite famous in patent litigation circles (he went from defending some of the biggest tech firms from patent trolls to working exclusively with and for patent trolls to attack them).

Anyway, EasyWeb claims that Facebook and Twitter – the latter was sued last month, Facebook last week – willfully infringe five of its patents, obtained between 2006 and 2010.

The patents-in-suit are US7032030, US7596606, US7685247, US7689658, US7698372.

• US7032030 – Message publishing system and method
• US7596606 – Message publishing system for publishing messages from identified, authorized senders
• US7685247 – System for publishing and converting messages from identified, authorized senders
• US7689658 – Method for publishing messages from identified, authorized senders to subscribers
• US7698372 – System for publishing messages from identified, authorized senders to subscribers

Easyweb states that it had informed Twitter and Facebook about the patents first on June 2, 2011, however, neither made any attempts or actions to license the patents-in-suit.

The plaintiff seeks damages (complaint is embedded below screenshot from patent docs).

I’ve reached out to Facebook and Twitter, but they typically don’t comment on pending litigation.