Here’s an interesting factoid. Panera Bread, the national bakery and cafe chain, has blocked all Bit.ly links from users who happen to be using Panera’s free WiFi. In a tweet to user who was inquiring about the issue, Panera’s official Twitter handle responded that the coffee shops have “blocked b/c link is hidden & can’t determine content. Want to keep a friendly-family environment for all.” Hmm.

It appears that Panera has also blocked many of the other popular URL shorteners as well. It’s true that a short URL obscures the target address and present opportunities for spammers, but many URL shorteners offer previews of the longer links or content to mitigate the chance of accessing a site you don’t want to visit.

While the tech-loving world continues to debate the merits of the Droid following its launch on Friday, it’s pretty safe to say that the Android platform has seen a pretty hefty influx of users as of late. In the past two weeks alone, we’ve seen the aforementioned Droid, it’s cheaper, younger sibling, the Droid Eris, and the Sprint Moment all hit the shelves; if any of them sold even reasonably well, there’s a lot of new folk cracking open the Android Market for the first time right now.

For the sake of these nascent newbies, we’ve thrown together a list of a handful of apps we think are worth checking out right off the bat. Got a favorite of your own? Throw it into the comments below.

A not so well thought-out feature – or defect – allows any LinkedIn user to indicate the company they work for has acquired, merged with or become a division of another company without any third-party verification whatsoever. Worse, when a user falsely claims company A has e.g. purchased company B, this will actually show up on company B’s public profile as such. Needless to say, this could cause quite some confusion.

For examples, head on over to the LinkedIn profiles of Yahoo! and Google, which are both apparently owned by a Pakistani web hosting firm with about 10 employees. Or take a look at the public LinkedIn profile of Internet commerce giant eBay, which is seemingly a subsidiary to collector community and marketplace operator Colnect, whose founder and sole employee Amir Wald tipped us about the ‘feature’.

When Google CEO Eric Schmidt mentioned a few weeks ago that the M&A spigot is now back on at the search giant, he wasn’t talking about a trickle. Today’s announced deal to by mobile ad startup AdMob for $750 million is Google’s largest acquisition since its $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick in March, 2008, and its third-largest ever after the $1.65 billion YouTube acquisition in 2006.

Why such a big bet? Because Google is gunning hard to dominate mobile Web advertising and AdMob has an early foothold in the display side. By focusing on the needs of mobile app developers, AdMob has “built what is approaching a $100 million business in three years,” says Jim Goetz, the partner at Sequoia Capital who sits on AdMob’s board, referring to the annualized revenue run-rate of the company. Since AdMob splits its revenues 60/40 with publishers, that implies AdMob is on course to see $40 million of that $100 million gross. The company is also cash-flow positive, with 140 employees.

On the verge of rolling out its new geolocation feature, Twitter is thinking ahead. One potentially powerful use for it will be to showcase trending topics happening in specific places. The overall Trending Topic area has long been getting out of control with spam (which Twitter is now working to clean up), but location-specific trends could be very interesting. And Twitter clearly knows this as it has announced a new feature for third-party developers to use: Trends API.

In a post on its API announcement Google Group, Platform team member Raffi Krikorian writes that at least at first, this will only be open to specific locations in the world. For example, he cites San Francisco and London as two potential places that will be serviced by this. São Paulo is another mentioned in a tweet.

Don’t forget: John and I will be at the Surly Girl Saloon tonight around 6:30 PM. Look at the happy smiles on those faces! That could be you, this time! Feel free to tell us about the cool world-changing projects on which you’re working. We love to meet people working on amazing stuff.

I’m doing this just because no one really believes the stuff we get hit with here at TechCrunch every day. None of this ever gets posted. But I’m on a roll today, so why not.

And no matter how crazy the message, we do try to respond as helpfully as possible. We’re here all week, so feel free to email with any further relationship/legal advice requests. In fact, I’m thinking of starting a new once-a-day crazy email from the inbox series of posts.

We’ll update with any further response from Sarah.

From: Michael Arrington
Date: November 9, 2009 1:54:16 PM PST
To: Sarah
Subject: Re: sueing facebook??????

Maybe it’s time for a new boyfriend.

On Nov 9, 2009, at 1:42 PM, Sarah wrote:

Hi my name is Sarah and I have a quick question. My boyfriend got kicked off of face book for sending too many messages is there any way to get him back on if not then he is kicked off for at least a month. please contact me as [email removed]. please it is very important

After much trial and tribulation, I finally obtained Apple’s new Magic Mouse last week. Following its release, the $70 device was so popular that practically every store in the Bay Area was sold out of them for much of last week even though most were getting new shipments every morning. Supplies remain tight online where Apple is showing a 5 to 7 day waiting period and Amazon is showing a 2 to 5 week one. So is it worth it?

The short answer is yes. This is hands-down the best mouse Apple has ever made. It’s not even close. That said, it could be even better, and hopefully down the road, with a software update, it will be.

OffiSync, the Microsoft Office plugin that allows users to sync their documents easily with Google Docs, has launched a new release today that will make it even more appealing to businesses: support for Google Sites. Google Sites is the search giant’s answer to Microsoft SharePoint, so this will give business users an alternative solution they can use to manage their documents in a shared workspace. Today’s release also marks the launch of OffiSync’s first premium offering.

We’ve been tracking OffiSync’s progress for a while now: last May the startup launched support for Google Docs, and released an improved version over the summer that integrated Google Image Search. But until now they haven’t had a premium option that was tailored for business.

Discovery Communications is deepening its investment in online content with the launch of science and technology new site DiscoveryNews. Discovery is also launching a companion iPhone app, which costs $0.99 on the App Store.

Discovery News was previously a feature within Discovery Channel’s website. The standalone site will which focus on a variety of news relating in the Earth, Space, Tech, Animals, Dinosaurs, Archaeology, Human and History categories. The platform will include breaking news as well as in-depth features on sci-tech topics. The site will also feature regular contributions from HowStuffWorks.com, which Discovery acquired in 2007. Discovery previously acquired environmentally focused blog TreeHugger.com.

If you want to sell something to TechCrunch, or anyone, the best way of going about it isn’t to call people at their home number, accuse them of dishonesty, and then follow up with an email requesting a clearly unethical trading of services.

All those things happened to me in the last five minutes. An account executive from CDNetworks called on my home phone to discuss our content delivery needs. I said we were all set. I was asked if I traded content delivery for PR. I said “yes, we always trade stories for free stuff,” and, when she didn’t hear the sarcasm, told her I wasn’t being serious. We hung up.

Then I get a cheery email offering content delivery in “some type of exchange for some article write up or PR with TechCrunch.”

Sorry, that may be how the old trade magazine did things, but it isn’t how any ethical blog would behave. But you can have this post for free.

It’s worth noting that lots of companies give us free services all the time, and we often thank them with a link in the right sidebar. But asking for free press is just so distasteful. And I hate sales calls to my house.

Email below:

As a blackberry user, I generally feel a little left out of of the location-based apps world. FourSquare only provides a mobile site for BlackBerry users (but has an Android app). BrightKite has an innovative BlackBerry app, but it’s not nearly as feature-rich as its sister iPhone app. Today, location-based social network Loopt is making a major upgrade to its BlackBerry app.

The new version of the app has one significant feature that even trumps the iPhone app: background location updating. So even when the app isn’t running, your location will be updated in real-time in the background. Loopt’s new app also pulls in local content about restaurants, bars and events from Zagat, Citysearch and the Loopt community, creating a local search engine within the app.And you can rate places you visit as well from the app.

Some things in life are a certainty. Death. Taxes. Lawsuits. An example: If you steal from your customers for half a decade and then force them to sign a no-lawsuit agreement before you give them their money back, you’re going to get sued.

And that’s exactly what happened to SnapNames. Last week the company admitted that an executive has been bidding on auctions for domain names, driving up prices. Money would be refunded, plus interest, said SnapNames, but customers were required to sign an agreement waiving any legal rights.

Today the Cueto Law Group filed a class action lawsuit against SnapNames. The press release is below.

Sadly, most class action lawsuits result in little money ever reaching plaintiffs – only the lawyers make the big dollars. In our opinion criminal charges should be brought against a wide variety of SnapNames executives as well.

The press release:

Good news for Irish startups. The Irish government in partnership with Bank of Ireland and Limerick University have announced a new €26m fund for early stage companies.

The Bank of Ireland Seed and Early Stage Equity Fund will make investments ranging from €100,000 to €500,000 and will target “export-oriented high potential firms that operate in the technology, food and financial services sectors”, reports The Irish Times, in addition to a Silicon Valley-esque remit to support patent-pending projects within Irish universities.

Google has just announced that it has acquired AdMob, the mobile ad platform that has been especially popular on the iPhone, for $750 million. This is a big win for the company’s early investors, which include Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners (this is a huge day for Accel — they were also investors in Playfish, which was just acquired by EA. More recent investors include DFJ and Northgate Capital.

AdMob founder Omar Hamoui sent the following letter to customers:

Today we announced that AdMob has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Google for $750 million. We are extremely excited about this new partnership and what it means for our advertiser, developer and publisher partners.

AdMob’s people, products and tools will continue to work to deliver successful campaigns for you and to effectively monetize your mobile traffic – no interruptions. Our product and engineering teams will keep building great products for our customers. Our sales team will keep working with our thousands of advertisers to deliver successful campaigns. Our business development team will keep working to maximize ad revenue for the more than 15,000 mobile Web sites and applications that make up AdMob’s publisher network.

Last month Skype was in talks to acquire VoIP startup Gizmo5. It was a perfect backup plan in case all that IP litigation didn’t work out. – Gizmo5’s SIP infrastructure could theoretically replace Skype’s proprietary P2P back end.

After the Skype settlement, though, Gizmo5’s strategic value to Skype sort of plummeted. In the meantime, Google bought them, say multiple sources with knowledge of the deal, for around $30 million in cash. The deal is done, say our sources, and will be announced shortly.

Gizmo5 is a good fit with a number of Google products. Google Talk allows voice calls between users but has no PSTN link to allow incoming or outbound calls to real phones. Gizmo5 does this well already.

And Google Voice is a great VoIP and phone identity service, but they have no endpoint for calls. Gizmo5, which by the way already integrates with Google Voice, is a soft phone end point for Google phone users. In other words, you will be able to make and receive calls to your Google Voice phone number from your computer.

This looks to me like Gizmo5 will be the glue that puts Google Voice and Google Talk together into a single product. And that product looks a lot like a Skype competitor.

Back in the olden days, long before the advent of electric light, our forefathers dreamt of a better place. They dreamt of running hot and cold water in their wash rooms, wireless telegraphy, and the rise of the horseless carriage. They dreamt of threshing machines that could tie down an acre of millet an hour and helioplanes that could transport humans from one place to another in comfort and style. But what was the dream that drove our forefathers to strive for better things, always? What dream sustained them through a Depression and two World Wars? What was the silent prayer they mumbled nightly to the heavens from their pinched and chapped lips? Friends, they dreamt of a website that lets you mix your own trail mix and cereal. And that dream is now a reality.

Mojamix is an online granola manufacturing system. You select your base, then add dried fruit, seeds, and nuts. They package up your foodstuff and send it to your home via first class mail. The average 12-ounce bag costs about $12 and there is the possibility of adding chocolate-covered cashews to the mix. This last part is what clinched it for me.

After lengthy negotiations, Electronic Arts closed it’s anticipated acquisition of social gaming startup Playfish for $275 million in cash. An additional $25 million in stock will be set aside for retaining the top talent at the startup, and another $100 million in earnouts are part of the deal as well if the business hits certain milestones. So the total value of the deal could amount to as much as $400 million when all is said and done. Although, earnouts have a tendency to come up short (see Skype).

Playfish is based in London, and has raised $21 million from Accel Partners and Index ventures. The Accel investment is from its European fund.

Last year at a presentation at the Founder’s Forum in Hampshire, England, CEO Kristian Segerstrale put up a slide with a dinosaur and expressed his desire to “kill EA.” Now he’s joining them instead. Funny how that works.

Come back with me to the turn of the century, about 1996. Your humble narrator was working for campus police at Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh, creating FileMaker databases for their police reports. It wasn’t uncommon then to see DOS machines sitting beside Windows 95 machines and the web was a primitive and strange thing. There were only two browsers of note, Netscape and Internet Explorer, and firing either up was neither comfortable or interesting. But, hidden deep behind Netscape’s bland carapace, was Mozilla. When you typed “about:mozilla” in the Netscape address bar, for example, you got:

Xignite, a San Mateo, CA-based provider of on-demand financial market data, today announced a couple of new customers that are working on interesting things, including micro-blogging information service StockTwits and iPhone app developer Turing Studios.

Customer wins are one thing, but Xignite has a pretty interesting model, has attracted millions in venture capital funding, boasts an impressive customer roster and still manages to largely fly under the radar. So this gives us a perfect excuse to take a closer look.