We’ve released a new update, check it out (www.picnik.com). This release has a lot of new code, most of it to make logins really easy. Now you can create you own account with your name and password which makes it easy to log in from anywhere – no pesky beta email link required! Also, if you just want to try Picnik without an account, click on the “try it now” button and you’re in.

If you’re a beta user and having trouble logging in, click on the lost password link and we’ll help you get your password and/or get you set up with a new account.

We also did a lot of work to make the back button work right, moved to a new, really fast server with tons of bandwidth and fixed a lot of bugs. Keep checking in, we’re going to be working away on a bunch of new image fixing and editing features next.

We love to hear from you guys, please keep emailing us with those feature requests.

Welcome to the Bitnik Company blog! We’re a new Seattle based company. We’re focused on creating fun, innovative and easy ways to make your online photos better. But if you’re reading this, you’ve probably already used Picnik. If not, check it out at www.picnik.com.

First, a few introductions. Bitnik was founded by myself (Mike Harrington), Darrin Massena and Jonathan Sposato. The three of us have had oddly parallel careers starting in the game industry in the mid 80’s, Microsoft in the 90s and then each of us founded startups post Microsoft (Valve, Spiffcode and Phatbits, respectively). During that time we occasionally found ourselves working together and thinking that someday it would be great if we could start a company. Jon is our business/ceo, Darrin is the lead developer/cto and I’m the utility in-fielder/coo.

We also have two very talented fellow bitnikers, Peter Roman and Brian Terry. Peter is our UI/Graphics wizard, the man on the team who actually possesses a sense of style and who saves the world from our “programmer art” interfaces. Brian is a programmer who has had years of experience with startups and big web sites and currently is packing features into picnik as quick as we can release it. I’m really happy with the team we have.

When we were starting this company, I read tons of blogs of other startups like the Robot Coop, 37 Signals, Joel on Software, Andy Sacks’ blog and many others. I really appreciated the candor and openness of the blogs and I made a promise to myself that I would do my best to reciprocate with our blog.

Frankly, we have some things that we haven’t worked out yet, like the fact that our company name is Bitnik and our product name is Picnik. Originally, when it was just me and Darrin, we came up with Bitnik as our company name. It wasn’t until much later that we came up with the Picnik product idea and started assembling a team. Now it just seems confusing. We’ll be working on that soon.