Over the weekend Team Picnik gathered for the Second Annual Picnik Picnic!  We dusted off our boots and climbed into our flannels to rally up at Remlinger Farms in Carnation Washington.

Jonathan presented each member of the team with a customized award for excellence, such as Most Caffeinated without Coffee and Most Likely to Wear a Shirt Designed for a Kid.  After a farm fresh feast of hot dogs, hamburgers and pizza, we were ready to hit the rides!  We partook in everything the farm had to offer from the 4-H barnyard to the not-so-haunted house.  We cruised the Mine Coaster, held in our lunches on the Spinning Barrels and rode the rails in a mini steam train which toted us around the entire farm.

After a sweet (and salty) interlude involving kettle corn we were onto the hayride, pumpkin patch and corn maze!  Before we knew it, the sun was setting, the air was becoming crisp and the map of the maze was failing us.  With the kettle corn sustaining our bellies and the onset of darkness keeping us in motion, we chugged on.  And on.  Eventually stumbling upon a way out and back to the warmth of our homes, where we slept like babies.

It really was the perfect day for a picnic.

Our resident penguin handler, Justin Huff, has returned to Picnik Headquarters from the Washington State Convention & Trade Center after captivating the attendees of IT Roadmap Seattle earlier this week.

Justin educated the crowd on the woes, wonders, and juggling act that comes with Picnik’s high demand for storage capacity and computing power. Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 services combined with patience and Zen make the perfect, cost-effective combination that we require to meet the needs of our users.

Justin also acted as Whippersnapper Ambassador to the IT Nation. On a panel entitled, “Generation Transformation – How Younger Hires are Drastically Changing Business and IT Paradigms,” Justin offered a unique perspective as the sole panel member born in the 80s. And, yes, Justin was the only panelist sporting jeans.

Although the resemblance is quite uncanny, you’re looking at the charming and dapper professionals of Team Picnik and not the stars of AMC’s hit television series Mad Men.

It’s true, we here at Picnik like to push the boundaries when it comes to fashion. On most days you will find us dressed to the nines in the highest of quality bleu de Gênes, or jeans, if you will. We’re known for dazzling the greater Seattle area with our denim in various shades of blue: cobalt, navy, indigo and royal!

But on Friday we raised the classy bar to a significant new height. Consider this the startup fashion statement of the year! In the name of prevailing taste, the Season 3 premier of Mad Men and maintaining the utmost  levels of awesomeness, we dressed the part of 1960’s office workers pounding on typewriters and puffing on (in our case, fake) cigarettes.

Jr. Designer, Kelcey, won our in house contest for Best Dressed lady in a sublimely vintage, Peggy Olsonesque dress and jacket. Developer extraordinaire, Alastair, took it home for the Best Dressed gent with a sleek, black cardigan and thick rimmed, lens-less glasses.

We’ve since given up the demanding world of fame and fashion (autograph signing can be such a drag) retiring to the familiarity of jean and jersey. So until someone invents the time machine, these old charmers will be stuck in the threads of a post-millennial landscape.

We’ve set our away messages, synchronized our watches to Central Daylight Time, and hit the dusty trail (A.K.A. I-5) to Sea-Tac airport. Today, we three ladies of Picnik are boarding our flight for the Windy City!

What’s with the globetrotting, you ask? Lisa, Sarah, and I are off to reveal the superhuman photo editing powers of Picnik to the ladies of BlogHer at their 5th annual conference! We’ll be demoing the best of Picnik out of Booth #112 alongside our trusty press rep, Bridget, while giving away some choice Picnik swag. Come find us!

Don’t worry, we’re leaving a few days early to scarf some deep-dish, cruise the Magnificent Mile, catch a few bars of the blues, and rofl to some world-class improv.

Along the way, we’ll be posting photos to a Flickr stream here. Follow along on our whimsical forays and misadventures in America’s 3rd largest city, Chicago!

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!