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!

We here at Picnik World Head-quarters are all still scraping our jaws off the floor after COO Mike Harrington completed a Half Ironman in Saturday’s Ironman Hawaii. He did his 1.2 mile open-water swim across the Kailua-Kona Bay, 56 mile bike across the lava desert to Hawi and back, and 13.1 mile run along the Big Island coast between the Puako Petroglyph Archaeological Park and the Nomura Hawaii Village, for a total of 70.3 miles, all in just 7:09:39. There are those of us who can’t sit in a chair for that long without getting tired.

Also on Saturday was the annual Issaquah Triathlon, a sprint Triathlon of much more humane distances of 1/4 mile swim, 15 mile bike ride and 3 mile run all around the Lake Sammamish area just to the east of us, which Penguin Handler Justin entered again and finished in 1:13:22, a 20 minute improvement on last year!

Eating. Let’s be honest, it’s something we Americans are experts at! And here in Seattle, the home of Pike Place Market, world famous coffees, geoducks, Salumi salami, and the only certified fair trade and organic chocolate factory in the US, we really know how to eat right. We even managed to turn the Space Needle into a restaurant, for goodness sake! So, it was an ideal location for the first ever International Food Blogger Conference presented by Foodista.

Tickets to the three-day event sold out immediately, proving that not only do we enjoy consuming food, we also love talking about food, sharing our experiences with food, and pouring over the digital concoctions of fellow food bloggers. Sarah and I joined a panel called “Food Porn: Food Photography & Styling” alongside chef and author Kathy Casey and food stylist Patty Wittmann. We walked through a quick and dirty Picnik demo, showing the attendant foodies how easy it is to make your food look as delicious as it tastes. We demonstrated how to adjust for poor lighting with a quick auto-fix, resize the image so it fits perfectly on your blog, or flip your pineapple upside down cake upside down! We also showed how to make your alfredo absolutely dreamy with the Orton-ish effect, recreate Mom’s famous apple pie with the 1960’s effect, or sweep away those pesky crumbs with the Clone tool.

What a perfect fit for bloggers who need a little help making their pictures as mouth watering as the masterpieces they whip up! Thanks to all the attendees who asked great questions and offered their testimonials on how Picnik is already as essential as their recipes. Picnik and delicious dishes make a steamy couple and now the word is out.

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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.

The Webware 100 polls close on Thursday so there are just two little days left to register your vote for Picnik as the best Photo & Video site out there! The winners will be announced on the 19th of May, and until then we’re all on the edges of our seats, but in the meantime, take that uncertainty head on and vote Picnik! Then wish us luck!

Our other big contest, the Seattle 2.0 Awards, are closing their polls today, and the winners will be announced next Thursday at the Pacific Science Center in the shadow of the Space Needle. We’ll keep you posted!

Have you noticed? Picnik is up for five awards this month! Four are conveniently located in the same place for easy voting:

• Best Startup: Picnik!
• Best Bootstrapped Startup: Picnik!
• Best Startup CEO: Jonathan Sposato of Picnik!
• Best Startup Product Designer: Peter Roman of Picnik!

And nominated for the best from the Audio & Video category in the Webware 100 Awards: Picnik!

So click those two little links, tick all the boxes that say “Picnik”, and wish us luck!

Mike and Justin are winging their way down to San Francisco (on wifi enabled Virgin America, no less!) for this year’s Web 2.0 Expo at the Moscone Center. Three days full of action, excitement, intrigue, and web operations, the highlight will surely be Friday afternoon’s talk from Mike and Justin themselves on “Inside Picnik:How we built Picnik and what we learned along the way.” That’s right, our very own COO and Penguin Handler shall dish the dirt on the wonders of Flash, our amazing growth, and everything you’ve ever wanted to know about CherryPy!

So keep an eye out for the guys from Picnik, and say hi when you see them!

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!

The sun was out, the app was up and running like a champ, the box office called out to us: it was the perfect day for a little R and R. I should have known better.

Last night you may have noticed a big ugly error page where Picnik should have been and a long list of trouble shooting suggestions that all led back to trouble. I wish I could say, “Well, you know the internet, such a fickle mistress,” or maybe I could have said that our tweet tipped off a gang of underground web 2.0 hackers, or even that the ninja cat sensed our retreat and attacked the servers in our absence. In fact, I’m almost tempted to craft an epic saga of renegade pixels joining forces with mutinous coding to rise up in rebellion and override Picnik, but it’s time to come clean:

I was looking at the wrong page in my calendar.

That’s really all it comes down to. I was looking at the wrong date, so I didn’t hit the renew button for our basic security certificate before grabbing my coat and heading out the door. To all those who suffered in the absence of Picnik, I am sorry. Picnik is back up and I’ll be double checking the dates in my agenda from now on.

Thanks for your patience, everyone!