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!

Another month, another award! Picnik is pleased to have been nominated for the 2009 Webware 100 awards! The top 100 Web 2.0 applications are selected by YOU the public, so vote for your favorite photo editor from now until April 19!

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!

Picnik’s SXSW team Peter (The Designer), Michael (The Other Designer), Mike (COO), and Jonathan (CEO) are thrilled to congratulate our friends at Flickr for winning in the Classic category at the 12th Annual South by Southwest Interactive Web Awards! As their partner photo editor, we’re proud to be part of their award-winning functionality, interactivity, and, of course, creativity!

Picnik’s SXSW team have been having a grand old time in Austin this weekend, and are looking forward to two more thrilling days of keynotes, panel discussions, and margaritas, buoyed by having been nominated in the same category as our friends at Flickr. All of us at Picnik want to thank all of you wonderful Picnikers who supported us, and we can’t wait till the guys get back to Seattle with all the learning, inspiration, and hangover cures they’ve picked up this week!

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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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.

It’s that time of year again, simultaneously the beginning of the guacamole season and the official end of the holidays: the Sunday when all Americans gather together for buffalo wings, nachos, and FedEx ads.

The championship game of the sport Americans peculiarly refer to as “football” (when in reality it’s closer to rugby), about a hundred million people watch the “Big Game” every year, which even if it isn’t as many visits Picnik gets in a year, is still a lot of gridiron fans. So as a service to all you hundred million devotees of the game, we have a brand new collection of Shapes for you to adorn your Sunday parties with: helmets, jerseys and, of course beer.

We would also like to announce the other big release today for Premium Picnikers: Gritty! Sort of like Orton-ish’s worst enemy, Gritty is designed to make you look real, tough, legit, right there, stepped up, and not taking nuthin from nobody. Like, don’t mess with me, I’m Gritty.

There’s an exciting new Effect just released for Premium Picnikers: Dots and Dots! Actually more like 8 features, Dots and Dots include Impressionist Dots, Light Peg Dots, Color Spots Dots, Circle Dreams Dots, Newsprint Dots, CMY Halftone Dots, Jumbotron Dots, and Scoreboard Dots. Also, each one has the full range of Advanced blend Modes and each can be painted in (and out!) of your photo!