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.

In 2005, after already 20 years being technologically innovative, Darrin got together with old Microsoft cohort Mike and Synergistic Software confrère Jonathan, and then gathered together a merry band of designers, engineers, and liberal arts majors, and Picnik was born. Three years ago, when they started Picnik, the words “rich internet application” were unheard of strung together like that, Flash was mostly known for making punch-the-monkey e-cards to send to other procrastinating coworkers, and Flex didn’t exist yet. But Darrin saw that Flash would allow an innovative developer to make richer internet applications than yet existed.

Picnik was the first to combine the richness and performance of a desktop application with the convenience and connectedness of a web site. Picnik continues to push the envelope like when Flash 10 came out last year, Picnik was the first to show what could be done with its new Pixel Bender technology.

The awesomeness of Picnik is already well-documented, but it can’t be overstated how Darrin’s specific insights made it awesome. Combining the emerging technologies in Flash and Flex to create an experience never before seen on the web, making the architecture of client/server software smarter, increasing the potential for application web services, and how photo editing at all could be a prime example of all that is possible to do with those technologies, all over the web, were key perceptions on the part of Darrin’s without which there would be no Picnik. And since Picnik, all sorts of people have developed similar applications, but they’ve done so in a landscape that was changed by Picnik. And as a result, Picnik has been mentioned glowingly in publications ranging from The Wall Street Journal to Wired and Macworld, and won prestigious awards from across the development, design, and business spectrum.

So because of Darrin’s technological innovativeness, we all have photographs on all our desktops, a top ranked iPhone game, and the world’s best online photo editor. Which is why we think he’d make a great Technology Innovator of the Year!

This entry was posted on Friday, February 20th, 2009 at 5:32 pm and is filed under News. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.