Romain Dillet is a writer at TechCrunch.
Originally from France, Romain attended EMLYON Business School, a leading French business school specialized in entrepreneurship. He covers many things from mobile apps with great designs to complex tech achievements. He is a pop culture devotee.
He now lives in Lyon and likes to cover New York startups as he used to live there.
Bitcoin exchange service Mt. Gox is experiencing some issues with U.S. authorities. The Department of Homeland Security issued a seizure warrant to Dwolla for the money in Mt. Gox’s Dwolla account. Mt. Gox users can’t use Dwolla as a funding option anymore even though it was one of the most popular options. The Japanese startup failed to register in the U.S. as a money transmitting… → Read More
Today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, Ashton Kutcher took the stage with Guy Oseary to talk about their A-Grade fund. Arrington started right away about a rumor that the fund is raising money at a $100 million valuation. The two partners confirm the rumors, saying that they are raising “enough money.” It means that financial institutions and companies will invest a certain amount of money in… → Read More
Today at Disrupt NY, Ken Lerer and Ben Lerer took the stage to talk about Lerer Ventures and their respective entrepreneur stories. One thing that caught the attention of the audience is when Ken Lerer talked about gun control and a new StopTheNRA.com website. “We are going to launch StopTheNRA.com,” Ken Lerer said. The site should be up in about two weeks. They already own the domain… → Read More
Docurated is a enterprise tool targeted towards enterprise users — it is publicly launching onstage at Disrupt NY. It aggregates all your documents in one place, turning them into a beautiful searchable and customizable database. Docurated will now provide Dropbox integration as well. “We don’t need any more 20 file sharing solutions,” co-founder and chief product officer… → Read More
Today at Disrupt NY, Stripe co-founder John Collison participated on a panel with Hill Ferguson (PayPal) and Sahil Lavingia (Gumroad) about digital money. He shared that Walmart’s Goodies.co is now using Stripe to process payments. Convincing a big company like Walmart to switch to Stripe is a big achievement for the startup. During the panel, Collison shared what made Stripe possible. When… → Read More
It looks like lightning has struck on the towers of Dailymotion. Yahoo’s bid to take a $200 million majority stake in the video site — known as the ‘YouTube of France’ — by buying a stake from carrier France Telecom/Orange has been killed by the French government, which decided that it didn’t want a U.S. company to take a controlling stake in a French operation… → Read More
Floored scans office spaces, apartments and houses using 3D camera technology and proprietary software to build customizable 3D models for real estate purposes. At Disrupt NY 2013, the company launched the platform to create an immersive, interactive and user-friendly experience. Instead of static photos and floor plans, you can move around in real-time, add furniture and easily realize if the… → Read More
Today at Disrupt NY 2013, Foursquare founder and CEO Dennis Crowley denied rumors that growth was stagnant for Foursquare. “I think there’s a little bit of perception that we’re not growing,” Crowley said. ”This is false.” In reality, March 2013 was the best month to date. When it comes to growth numbers, Crowley started by saying that “[they] don’t talk about… → Read More
Today at Disrupt NY 2013, Benchmark partner Bill Gurley shared an interesting fact about Uber. “Uber is growing faster than eBay did,” Gurley said. In 1997, Benchmark invested $6.7 million in eBay. It was worth more than $5 billion less than two years later. Benchmark is also an investor in Uber. “Uber is probably the fastest growing company that we’ve ever had,” Gurley… → Read More
Carson Britt and Matthew Drake convinced everyone with their onstage demo of Laser Mountain at the Disrupt NY Hackathon. They attached Android phones to the Nerf guns (that TechCrunch gave away yesterday) to recreate a laser tag game with a real-time score server. After receiving the Nerf guns, they started working right away on Laser Mountain. “We already had the domain name… → Read More
After 24 hours of hard work at the Disrupt NY Hackathon, Michael Kolodny, Jingen Lin and Ricardo Falletti demoed us HangoutLater, a nifty hack built on top of the Foursquare API. When you check in and a friend is close to you, it will ask you if you want to hang out later. Then, it will automatically find you a central location to meet. Kolodny and Lin already knew each other before the event. → Read More
The hacking has begun. As I write this, participants of the Disrupt NY Hackathon have been working for about six hours on what they are going to show us onstage tomorrow. We talked with a few of them to see how motivated they are. Full of energy, most of them are still enthusiastic about the long and (mostly) sleepless night ahead of them. It takes dedication to build something awesome in fewer… → Read More
Apple now has $145 billion in cash and it needs to do something about it. That’s why Apple CEO Tim Cook just announced during the earnings call that the company will initiate a stock buyback. It means that Apple will use part of its cash to repurchase existing shares, taking them out of the market, increasing existing stockholders’ shares. That investment will go directly to existing… → Read More
Apple CEO Tim Cook made a very candid introduction remark during the earnings call. “We acknowledge that our growth rate has slowed,” Cook said. He then said that Apple has experienced “tremendous successes” over the past few years and that may be the reason why growth is slowing. “Decline in stock price has been very frustrating to all of us,” he said. → Read More
Apple now has $145 billion in cash on hand — a 5.8 percent increase over the past three months. The company last reported that they had $137.1 billion in cash back on December 30. To put this into perspective, with $140 million, you can produce the movie Spider-Man. Apple has enough money to produce a thousand blockbusters. Apple could use its cash to acquire some companies. But with more… → Read More
Conventional wisdom has it that Apple has reached its peak and can only disappoint from now on. Yet, many financial facts don’t make sense. The market is too harsh with Apple compared to its competitors. But when it comes to products, there is an unsettling detail: there was no product release during fiscal Q2 2013. While Apple is certainly not doomed, its future looks gloomy. That’s… → Read More
Apple shares (NASDAQ:AAPL) are currently trading down at $398.11, 6.6 percent below yesterday’s closing price of $426.24. It represents a stark downturn for the stock as well as a 16-month low. Earnings could be to blame as they are coming soon and investors are not sure what to expect. → Read More
iOS App Discovery Service AppGratis just confirmed that it was indeed pulled from the App Store on Friday. At the time, commentators were left wondering what was wrong with AppGratis’ app. Founder and CEO Simon Dawlat wrote a long blog post explaining the full story. “AppGratis is very much up and running,” Dawlat said. “The reports of our death are greatly… → Read More
Apple pulled discovery service and daily deal app AppGratis from the App Store. So far, AppGratis is not communicating on the issue and users can only speculate about what the issue is. Sometimes, Apple pulls an app because its latest update crashes or because the app uses a private API. Then, the developer has to submit a new release to return to the App Store. But there could be a bigger issue. → Read More
After the U.S. cleared the deal, the European Commission has officially approved the proposed merger between two of the biggest book publishers in the world, Random House and Penguin. The two owners Pearson and Bertelsmann announced the new venture back in October. As it is seeking “new digital publishing models,” the merger has been widely commented on as a way to counter Amazon’s influence on… → Read More
Today at the Facebook phone event, the company unveiled Facebook Home, an Android “app” that will change your phone’s home screen and core features. It will be released in the Play Store on April 12, with an update coming every month. At first, Facebook Home will only work on selected devices, because the company needs to work with hardware partners to make it compatible. The HTC… → Read More
Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh’s Downtown Project just announced a new venture called Project 100, a complete transportation system for Las Vegas. For a monthly subscription fee, users will be able to borrow a car, get a driver thanks to an app or take a bike for a ride. But the key feature is that you’ll ride in a Tesla Model S — the Downtown Project just bought 100 Teslas. → Read More
iOS calendar app Sunrise received its first update a month after its release, bringing more info and flexibility to your calendar. The team has pushed the LinkedIn integration a step forward by bringing the entire profile into the app. Now you can check previous work experiences and education from Sunrise’s interface. “The feedback we got from our launch is that Sunrise really changes… → Read More
Amazon just announced that it is adding its X-Ray feature to TV shows. The feature already worked with movies thanks to data from IMDb, but the company will now use this very same data for other video content. The entire Kindle Fire family will receive the feature and the Amazon Instant Video app on Wii U will get is as well. As a reminder, X-Ray allows you to discover more about the content you… → Read More
The Humble Bundles have been an amazing deal for gamers. Today, the company behind the bundles announced that they would introduce a new weekly sale, in addition to the usual bundles that happen every month or so. Everything else remains the same — pay what you want to get DRM-free downloads of indie games that work on Windows, Mac and Linux. A small customizable part of every sale goes to two… → Read More
Back in December, Nike unveiled the Nike+ Accelerator program, powered by TechStars. After going through hundreds of applications, TechStars and Nike selected ten finalists. They will now begin a three-month program and take advantage of the Nike+ API and SDK to develop and release new companion products for the Nike FuelBand or Sportswatch. The teams will relocate to Portland — next to… → Read More
Amazon just announced that it would be dropping the price of the 8.9-inch version of its Kindle Fire HD. The tablet will now cost $269 for the Wi-Fi only version and $399 for the Wi-Fi and LTE version. The Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ is now available in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Japan as well. Canada won’t get the device this time around. → Read More
After laying off 4,000 Motorola employees last year, representing around 20 percent of the total workforce, Google just announced that it would increase job cuts by a further 10 percent — now representing 1,200 people. The WSJ intercepted an internal email laying out the motivations behind this move. → Read More
It’s hard to find a compelling use case for the Philips Hue. But Jim Rutherford and his son hacked the wireless LED lightbulbs to be in sync with the day/night cycle in Minecraft. It creates an immersive setup and is actually useful as creepers start appearing at nighttime. → Read More
Security and caching service CloudFlare was down for close to an hour due to an issue with its edge routers. It’s now back up and running. As the service adds a layer between 785,000 websites and their users in order to speed up traffic and prevent DDoS attacks and other security issues, all of those websites were affected — 4chan was one of them. → Read More
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Disrupt Europe: Berlin Hackathon
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