Our twelfth Featured Picniker is Japanese native Hideki Okuno, who lives in Toyama Prefecture on the Japan Sea coast, he lives with his wife and eight-year-old son. A music fan, he studied to be a recording engineer and worked briefly in a recording studio where working on Macintoshes led him onto his current career. When he was 20 and living in Tokyo, he moved to Toyama and got married, traveling to Switzerland on his honeymoon. Today he works as a systems engineer and besides music and building models with his son, he of course enjoys photography!

With a regular procedure to his photos of importing his Raw files into iPhoto, using Canon Digital Professional to adjust white balance where needed and convert to jpegs, then uploading the jpegs into Picnik, editing, and saving directly from Picnik into Flickr, his Flickr stream, and activity in the Flickr Picnikers group, is constantly updated with pictures of his family, landscapes, flowers and plants, toys, animals, and the occasional bottle of whiskey. And yet he feels that he is only beginning to learn about photography, composition and exposure, and that portraits, landscapes, macro, B&W and abstracts, he wants to learn all of them. So of course, such a talented Picniker and enthusiastic learner is an ideal choice for our twelfth Featured Picniker!

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Picnik has been nominated for the Washington Technology Industry Association’s Consumer Product of the Year! But also, our fearless leader Darrin Massena has been nominated for the WTIA’s Technology Innovator of the Year! So we would like to introduce him to you all in a little greater depth, to finally separate truth from legend and reality from myth, and show how, because of his key insights into the possibilities of the technology behind Flash, Darrin made Picnik possible and a whole industry richer.

Before co-founding Picnik, Darrin contributed an array of innovations to the industry, including:

- Invented desktop wallpaper while at Microsoft (liberating us all from the 2-color tyranny)
- Managed development of whole new philosophies of computing in the Consumer Products Division and early massive cooperative gaming in the Research Division
- Co-founded open source development for Palm devices
- Co-created the award winning handheld game Warfare Incorporated, recently rereleased as a top-ten iPhone game! Plus more here.
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Picnik has been nominated for the South by Southwest Classic Award to be given out in Austin, Texas, next month! Why Classic? Turns out we’ve been around for such a long time (read: 2 years), we’re now officially considered a time-tested classic in the fast-paced, high-stakes interactive world, right up there with our competition of Flickr, StumpleUpon, Ars Technica, and Instructables.

But this means that all you Picnikers can help us win the “People’s Choice” Award! This award depends entirely on you! So vote today! Vote tomorrow! Vote every day!

We have exciting release news here at Picnik World Headquarters! Something we’ve been looking forward to for a long time is finally ready: a complete retooling of our Shapes Stickers tab!

Whereas before, due to a lot of fancy engineering stuff, we could only display the Basic shapes and non-Seasonal collections all year round, with a rotating set of Seasonal of Holiday shapes depending on the time of year, now, thanks to our crack team of intrepid engineers and designers, we can offer our users all the shapes we’ve ever had, all at once! Free users will, as always, get the huge assortment of Basic stickers, Miscellaneous stickers, Dingbats (including expanded Floralia and Loosy Design collections), and the excellent seasonal selection under the Featured headline (now playing: Valentine’s Day ♥). But for Premium Picnikers, there’s a whole new Seasonal section with everything from Snowflakes to Bastille Day to Back to School, all year round. So let it snow in July, start your Christmas cards in May, get your St Paddy’s on in October, and give thanks for turkey dinners every fourth Thursday of every month!

Also, another thrilling development in UI, look out for the new navigator in the bottom right-hand corner of your photo when you zoom in. It’s very handy.