When Bitnik, Inc was created, our founders envisioned making great software for real people and giving users the power to edit digital photos in their browser, without having to purchase or download complicated software. While our first office in 2005 only had two desks, today we’ve grown to 20 employees and have become the world’s most fun online photo editor, with millions of visitors every month. As we’ve grown together over the years, we’ve worked hard to build a company of great people creating great software. We think our emphasis on strong partnerships, a fun culture and you, our users, is what has made Picnik so awesome.

And all this leads us to today’s exciting news: we’ve just been acquired by Google! What does this mean for Picnik? It means we can think BIG. Google processes petabytes of data every day, and with their worldwide infrastructure and world-class team, it is truly the best home we could have found. Under the Google roof we’ll reach more people than ever before, impacting more lives and making more photos more awesome.

What does this mean for you Picnikers? Nothing is changing right away, but Picnik now has more potential than ever before. The team that built Picnik from the grass up will continue making advanced and powerful photo-editing easier, more intuitive and more fun, so stay tuned to hear about all the cool new stuff we’re working on. We want to thank you all for being great users, pushing us to grow and do big things. So thank you all for your continued support, and Happy Picniking!

- Mike, Darrin, Jonathan, Peter, Brian, Justin, Virginia, Steve, Charlie, Brenda, Michael, Ali, Sonia, Sarah, Lisa, Chelsea, Kelcey, Maria, Annie Laurie, Pearl, Michael B and Tim

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It’s that spooky time of year again at Picnik World Headquarters!

We’ve grown a lot as a company since last October and I’m afraid our capacity for mischief has grown as well. For instance, for the past two years at this time, Mike suddenly looks a bit off and starts mumbling about “braaaaaains“, Darrin seems furrier than normal and Jonathan keeps staring at Darrin’s neck. This year, since moving into new, larger offices, it’s a bit harder keeping track of where everyone is, but we would swear that some people are missing.

It all started at the beginning of the month. Mike called all the engineers into the conference room for a meeting. They were in there for hours and when they came out all looked a bit… pale. At first we didn’t notice, since they tend to sit silently at their computers anyway, rhythmically typing, typing, typing. Then we noticed none of them had headphones on. And they weren’t looking at their monitors at all, but staring really quite strangely at the backs of the designers’ heads.

Then the designers. No one noticed anything wrong with them, either. Sure, they came to work wearing black, with dark circles under their eyes, staring moodily and prone to dark corners, but what designer isn’t? It’s the coffin we noticed under Michael’s desk that made us wonder. It seems to have begun with that week Jonathan took them out to lunch, one by one. He took Kelcey out first, so why did she come back with two pricks in her neck? And the next day Michael came back from his lunch with Jonathan with a strange, thick, red fluid in his travel mug.

That’s when people began to disappear.

All this mysteriousness seems to have affected our work, hence the size of this week’s Halloween release. You can’t miss it under the Create tab, with four new scary sections! We’re really excited about all the creepy new features, and hope you all enjoy – or fear – them too.

(And where is Darrin in all this? He’s been pacing the length of his office, all alone, howling at the full moon.)

Picnik passed another big milestone this week, with every more millions of happy Picnikers using the site to add a little fun and awesomeness to their photos. We’d like to say we’ve been doing our part here at Team Picnik to boost our numbers, because we’ve got a little happy news.

Team Picnik is thrilled to announce that Charlie, our QA Manager and Community Relations Guy is back at work. Why was he gone? Because he had a baby!

That’s right, baby season continues at Picnik World Headquarters with baby Wyatt, the third baby this year. First Brian, our Quixotic Softographer, then CEO Jonathan, and now Charlie. Congratulations, Charlie and Kristi!

Justin (our Penguin Handler) and Mike (COO) are in San Jose this week for the annual Velocity Conference on web performance and operations. Keynote speakers this year include Jonathan Heiliger of Facebook, Marissa Mayer of Google, John Adams of Twitter, and Justin Huff of Picnik! That’s right, Justin gave a keynote today on “2 Years Later: Loving and Hating the Cloud,” and Mike went along to cheer for him.

Most of our users might hear about “the Cloud” and wonder, “Why would Justin hate the Picnik clouds?” but actually the Cloud is where most of Picnik is stored! It refers to all our offsite data storage, processing, flexibility, and not making Justin install all that hardware himself. That way, it’s where we don’t have to look at it, as if it were hidden behind big white fluffy clouds. So Justin was down there to talk about love, hate, and laziness.

They’ll be there for the rest of the conference, so if you run into them, say hi!

Update: The video is now online!

Team Picnik had a great night at the Seattle 2.0 Awards last night and it was all thanks to all you Picnikers out there!

We were nominated for four awards: Best Startup Product Designer (Peter Roman), Best Startup CEO (Jonathan Sposato), Best Boot-Strapped Startup and Best Startup (as in, the best startup in Seattle) and we won every one of them! We’re so excited!

The event was great too: held at the Pacific Science Center next to the Space Needle, it was really expertly put together by Marcello Calbucci and he deserves a lot of congratulations for organizing such a fun evening. As Marcello pointed out in his speech last night, the Seattle 2.0 Awards are important because Seattle especially is such a wonderful place for startups with a vibrant tech community, active investor base, and booming with ideas and entrepreneurial spirit. The technology and startup industry in Seattle is a special, dynamic place, and it’s because of that that this Seattle-specific award means so much to us.

But we couldn’t have done it without all our loyal Picnikers! You read our Facebook updates, our Twitter tweets, and blog posts, and you clicked that badge on the Welcome page and because of your enthusiasm and all your votes we won! And we can’t thank you enough for giving us such a fun night. So thank you.

Hot on the heels of our Webware 100 nomination, we’ve already been nominated for not one more award, not two, not even three, but four awards in this year’s Seattle 2.0 Awards!

We’ve been nominated for Best Startup! Because Picnik is one of the most innovative, industry-leading, fun, growing-by-leaps-and-bounds, making-money-in–this-economy, and generally awesome startups out there!

Jonathan’s been nominated for Best Startup CEO! Because of his history of successful serial entrepreneurship which has turned his own successful stint at Microsoft into successful startup experiences for dozens more people including his last company, Phatbits, sold to Google in 2006, and now us lucky Team Picnik members. He’s also polite, savvy, and well-dressed!

And all three of our founding partners together can be congratulated for Picnik being nominated for Best Bootstrapped Startup, because all of Picnik is here and cashflow positive without any outside funding!

And lastly, Peter has been nominated for Best Startup Product Designer! As “The Designer” at Picnik, Peter came on as Employee #1 and designed and implemented Picnik’s entire brand, UI, UX, early marketing endeavors, even a bit of PR and a large amount of product planning and development. He’s unique in his field in his ability to work with and understand the languages of designers, developers, and lolcats, and through his devotion to the product, its millions of users, and the bottom line, without him there would quite literally be no Picnik.

Meanwhile, don’t forget to vote Picnik in the Webware 100 Awards! We’ve got some pretty stiff competition, so we’ll need every one of you wonderful, supportive, vote-happy fans!

Team Picnik is ever-so-proud of our very own Darrin Massena for winning the Technology Innovator of the Year award at Wednesday night’s WTIA Awards. He’s got a fancy vase on his desk now, and the rest of us have sparkly “Washington Technology Industry Association” swag bags full of tchotchkes. The award has set off a flurry of press coverage, including some thoughtful photographs of the cupcake tree those of us who couldn’t attend missed. And we’d like to thank John Cook (of the Puget Sound Business Journal’s Tech Flash blog) for sprinkling his Good Luck Curse-Breaking Fairy Dust for calling it too. It was very serendipitous of him!

Darrin, Jonathan, Mike, Steve, Sarah, and their better halves are on their way to the Historic Paramount Theatre tonight for the 2009 WTIA Industry Achievement Awards!

Of course, Picnik is up for Consumer Product of the Year, and our very own Darrin Massena has been nominated for Technology Innovator of the Year! We hope that all you Washingtonians in the Technology Industry out there can make it tonight. We’d love to meet you all, plus, there will be cocktails, networking, gaming lounges, and you’ll get to find out if Darrin wears a tux!

See Darrin in all his innovative glory!

Hi! I’m Lisa and I’m the newest member of the Picnik team. Part of being new is learning, learning, oh and then some more learning. So I would like your help with my learning curve!

I know what I would love to see us do next but I want to know what you all think. I want to better understand how and why you visit Picnik. What you love and what you would love for us to do. So I (together with some of the magic-makers here at Picnik) have pulled together a quick survey! Everything is confidential but your answers will help guide what we should work on next.

So thanks ahead of time for helping make Picnik even better (and for helping me learn)!

Take the Picnik Survey! And Happy Picnicking!

Monday, March 16 Update: After a week of incredibly overwhelming response, we’re closing the survey and letting ourselves catch up with all your responses and tens of thousands of comments! We’ve already gone through half of them, and we’re going to to read every single one of them! Thank you all again for being so generous with your time, and in such numbers. And now that we know what you all think, we can’t wait to decide what we’re going to do next!