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.
Salesforce shares (NYSE:CRM) are trading today at their highest price ever — $181.46 a share. It represents a 7.23 percent increase compared to yesterday’s closing price. Today’s trend is directly related to Salesforce’s fourth-quarter earnings. With revenues up 32 percent year-over-year, the company could become a profit-making venture in the coming year. → Read More
Opera just announced that it would spin off its advertising business into a brand new entity called Opera Mediaworks. Fully owned by Opera, the new subsidiary will consolidate under one roof multiple recent acquisitions, such as Mobile Theory, 4th screen or Admarvel. The Norwegian-based company claims that the new entity is now the world’s largest mobile ad network. → Read More
Troubled operating system webOS isn’t defunct yet. According to CNET, LG just acquired software, licenses and the team working on webOS from HP. LG plans to implement it in its smart TVs — not in its phones. In yet another surprising event, Palm’s OS will experience a third (or fourth) life. → Read More
Back in January 2011, Orange acquired 49 percent of Dailymotion for $78 million (€59 million), and declared that they wanted to buy out the remaining 51 percent. But Dailymotion had to wait two years before further talks. By spending $80.6 million (€61 million) for the remaining stake, Orange acquired 100 percent of Dailymotion for $168 million (€127 million). → Read More
Shortly after market opening, Tesla shares (NASDAQ:TSLA) dropped 9.68 percent to 34.81 in the wake of yesterday’s earnings. The company disappointed investors as it reported a quarterly loss of $89.9 million, or 79 cents a share, compared with a loss of $81.5 million last year, or 78 cents a share. → Read More
Meet Sunrise, the calendar app that will replace every calendar app that you’ve tried so far. It’s the best calendar you’ll ever use. Behind its apparent simplicity, there’s a server component (like Mailbox), making it significantly smarter with data from Google Calendar, Facebook, LinkedIn and others. The app was made by ex-Foursquare designers who believe they may have finally figured out how to… → Read More
Facebook announced in an SEC filing that founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg now owns 29.3 percent of Facebook shares (NASDAQ:FB), up from a 28.2 percent stake on the day of the IPO. With 632.7 million shares currently trading at $28.50, it represents a bit more than $18 billion. → Read More
German luxury brand Loewe experienced a roller coaster day. A trader commented that “Apple supposedly wants to bid 4 euros a share for Loewe,” which sent Loewe shares up as much as 44.5 percent to 3.93 compared to yesterday’s closing price of 2.72. The German stock exchange closed today with Loewe shares trading at 3.35, representing a one-day increase of 23.16 percent. → Read More
Apple and Google are enemies and partners at the same time due to asymmetric competition. According to a report from Morgan Stanley, Google could pay more than $1 billion in 2014 to remain the default search engine on iOS. In 2009, Google paid only $82 million for the privilege. Analyst Scott Devitt believes that it is a per-device deal growing every year. → Read More
A handsome man pulls out a Microsoft Surface Pro from his bag. He’s wearing a well-cut suit (he’s at work.) He’s a hipster, but a serious one. While putting the Surface Pro on the table, two attractive women stop their conversation to look at this unknown and remarkable computer. Or is it a tablet? Either way, they’re ready to dance. → Read More
Right after yesterday’s earnings, LinkedIn shares (NYSE:LNKD) have popped 19.16 percent to 147.86. It is clearly linked to the company’s earnings. Revenue is up 81 percent to $304 million and net income is following the same trend. → Read More
With less than two months before OUYA’s launch, it’s time to tell the truth — its future doesn’t look promising. The OUYA is starting to feel like a gaming console without the games. Publishers and developers aren’t promoting OUYA games because there’s nothing to promote — nothing that was specifically developed for the launch line-up. Even worse, Final Fantasy III will be the flagship launch… → Read More
It keeps getting worse for French iPhone owners. The agency for telecommunications ARCEP has just announced that it would meet with the four French telcos to know if and when it should refarm Bouygues Telecom’s 1,800MHz band to bring LTE to the iPhone 5. The three other companies are begging the ARCEP to wait until at least 2014 to start this process, effectively lobbying for slowing down… → Read More
Live concert notification and recommendation app Bandsintown just released a Spotify app to make it easier to query its concert database. Whenever you are listening to something interesting on Spotify, just drag the track on Bandsintown’s icon in order to get upcoming tour dates. → Read More
Boston-based uTest just announced a new product, Applause. It’s a mobile app analytics service that has two key advantages. It works across Apple’s App Store and Google Play and it gives an easy-to-understand score, reminiscent of other scoring services such as social influence startup Klout. → Read More
Let’s put Apple’s amazing cash on hand numbers into perspective once again. The company now has $137.1 billion in cash — a 12.9 percent increase from the last reported number, $121.3 billion. With such a big figure, it’s hard to realize how big it actually is. In 2012, HP had $120.4 billion of annual revenue. Apple slightly edges HP’s revenue with its cash. Even more impressive, Apple has… → Read More
Apple just announced its Q1 2013 earnings, and investors don’t seem to be convinced. The company missed on revenue and exceeded expectations on earnings per share. After a solid day of trading for Apple shares (NASDAQ:AAPL), the stock dropped more than 10 percent in after-hours trading, inducing a big market capitalization meltdown. It is the biggest drop of the past four years for Apple… → Read More
Even though Intel’s quarterly earnings were a mixed bag, the biggest surprise comes from its research and development investment plans. In 2013, the company plans to invest $13 billion compared to $10.15 billion in 2012 and $8.35 billion in 2011. This money will be used to bridge the mobile gap, as ARM-based manufacturers are current market leaders. → Read More
Earlier today, Facebook unveiled its third pillar, graph search. While the announcement was highly anticipated, the unveiling didn’t live up to the hype from the investors’ perspective, as the stock (NASDAQ:FB) is currently down 3.23 percent at 29.95 –below $30 again. → Read More
DigitalOcean is a cloud hosting solution for small developers, looking for a cheap virtual private server to experiment, host web applications with low memory needs and run some cron jobs. While Linode and Rackspace provide cheap servers starting at $20 a month, DigitalOcean has two key advantages — it starts at $5 a month for a comparable offering, and it now uses SSD. → Read More
Live video streaming platform Ustream has announced with Teradek a new portable HDMI streaming device for $699. Just like Livestream’s Broadcaster, it is easy to use and compatible with a wide range of cameras, as long as they have an HDMI output. → Read More
Clear Channel’s iHeartRadio launches a new feature today called “Perfect for.” Available on iHeartRadio’s website and in its mobile apps, the company has shamelessly copied Songza‘s popular music concierge feature. Every step of the user experience is exactly the same, which mainly means that Songza is doing something right. → Read More
According to TmoNews, the Google Nexus 4 should become available in all T-Mobile stores starting in January. It could indicate that Google is slowly resolving inventory issues as the device has been hard to buy from Google Play. The device will remain available in the online store. → Read More
Slowly but surely, Chinese smartphones are making their way into consumers’ hands. While Huawei is a leading infrastructure company, it started designing and manufacturing smartphones only recently. So far, the company preferred to sell white-label smartphones to carriers around the world. But in 2012, Huawei has shipped 85 percent of its devices under its own brand, compared to a scant 20 percent… → Read More
Adobe announced yesterday that it had acquired New York-based company Behance. With 1 million members, the startup developed a LinkedIn for artists, allowing users to showcase their visual work. We just learned the financial terms from multiple sources. GigaOM first reported that it was north of $100 million. According to our sources, Adobe paid slightly more than $150 million in cash and stock… → Read More
Clothing startup Everlane has opened a pop-up store in New York for the holidays. We jumped on the opportunity to talk with founder and CEO Michael Preysman right in the middle of Everlane’s clothes. With 400,000 active members, the company is certainly catching the attention of many fashion aficionados. Everlane isn’t simply an online clothing shop selling the clothes you already… → Read More
Apple SVP of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue sent an interesting 31st tweet today. It’s a Foursquare check-in at Apple’s HQ, indicating that Cue is trying out the service at work. Moreover, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley is spending a week in San Francisco. These two circumstantial bits of information incite speculation: could they be talking about an acquisition, or a deep software… → Read More
Checkthis received a major update today, making it more than ever a visual complement to the text-only updates on social networks. The service enables users to create compelling posters and share them with their friends. But users now get realtime reactions, a web profile with all of their posters, and notifications. With the new features, it is even closer to a hybrid between Instagram and… → Read More
According to our own tests, as well as reports on Twitter, Facebook is down for a vast number of users. It’s the second big outage of the day after Google’s.
Mobile apps are still working for some. Some of our writers can load everything with their phones, but it’s not the case for everyone. It appears to be a DNS issue. If the address is cached on your phone, you can still access Facebook. → Read More
According to our own testings and many reports on Twitter, Gmail and other Google services, such as Google Play, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Chrome Sync, appear to be down for many users. Many are experiencing the outage, but it is not a total outage. The authentication system is probably to blame. → Read More
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