Two of the bestest startups in Seattle, Picnik and Wetpaint, have teamed up at last, bringing Picnik’s many photo powers into a seamless integration with Wetpaint! Picnik you know about, but in case you don’t know Wetpaint, they’re a wiki hosting and social networking service for regular people to collaborate online to create webpages about whatever interests them, with already over one million free wikis created. Picnik, too, is designed to give regular people photo-editing superpowers through simple but sophisticated editing tools and then save and share with friends, family, and the world, and doesn’t that sound like the point of a really good wiki? Now whenever you add a photo to your educational, lifestyle, or James Bond Wiki, you can click the Edit in Picnik link to add all of Picnik’s awesomeness to your Tudors fan photos, dogs pictures, or Daniel Craig’s DB9!

A lot has happened here at Picnik World Headquarters in the past couple of weeks! You all might think that what with all the awards, the conferences, the talks, the surveys, and a fair number of birthday cakes, we wouldn’t have had time for many releases, but oh we have. The Quixotic Softographer’s been tilting at windmills, the Penguin Handler’s been chasing the little dudes around the data center, Steve’s been drinking the tea as fast as he can, and our Data Stylist’s latest data stylings have us all singing Handel. Meanwhile, the Designers have been putting a grassy sheen on all this output while Charlie’s been churning out the releases on a weekly basis. Here’s a brief tour of some of the stuff we’ve put out in the last little while:

The new Fancy Focus effect makes it look like you spent time and money on setting up expensive lenses to get a perfect shot, with your subject in focus and the rest slightly desaturated and slightly faded. Great for crowd shots, busy backgrounds, and cake.

The new Gritty effect is great for people wanting to look real, unvarnished, tough.


There are new Stickers! We often get Picnikers writing in asking for more butterflies and sports shapes! So here you go, both Butterflies and Sports!

Not to mention, Easter and Spring are free for all during the next couple weeks to help everyone embellish their photos of Easter Egg hunts, soccer games, badminton tournaments, and generally the ability to go outdoors again. Meanwhile, all the other stuff mentioned is for our Premium Members only (upgrade here!).

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.