Travel season is nearly here! And in honor of National Travel & Tourism Week, we here at Picnik would like to extend a gentle reminder not to forget to pack your camera! Think of all those great vistas, silly signs and amazing people you see on your travels. You wouldn’t want to lose any of those moments, so leave the extra pair of shoes behind if you must but make room for that camera.

To help celebrate, and because sharing photos we’ve taken is one of our favorite things to do, too, we thought we’d show off some favorite travel photos from the Picnik team:

We hope that whether your coming adventures take you across oceans or close to home, you capture those memories you’ve created, and use Picnik to share them at their best with friends, family, and the world.

Happy Picniking and happy travels!

November is Movember, a whole month devoted to supporting and raising awareness for research and issues surrounding prostate cancer and men’s health. Men around the world show their support by starting clean shaven on November 1 and then growing a moustache for the entire month.

Free for the month of Movember, Picnik invites people of all genders to support their Mo Bros by using our new Beards tool to paint on a truly excellent moustache for your Facebook profile pictures, Twitter avatars, blog portraits, family snapshots, and anywhere else you’d like to commit yourself publicly to this worthy cause.

Team Picnik had a great time at the Seattle 2.0 Awards last week. Seattle 2.0 is a great organization here in Seattle designed to support the local startup community and help technology entrepreneurs build great companies. Jonathan was honored to be asked to deliver the keynote at this year’s awards ceremony, and took the opportunity to talk about building strong teams, hard work and persistence, and an object that has been in outer space.

Jonathan on stage during his keynote, left, and Nominees Darrin Massena and Pearl Chan before the ceremony, right.

You can watch a video of the whole thing here. Jonathan’s keynote starts at the 53 minute mark.

Seattle 2.0

Prime your browsers and get your mouse warmed up because Team Picnik has learned that our very own Darrin Massena (WTIA Technology Innovator of the Year, 2009) is nominated for the Seattle 2.0 Awards Startup Technologist of the Year! Darrin is so technologically innovative that he invented computer desktop wallpaper, founded Picnik and developed it as a rich internet application (before that particular bit of jargon had really been coined yet), and still works works every day (and frequently into the night) to make Picnik even more awesome. He’s thrilled to be nominated for this award, so vote for Darrin!

You can also vote for Pearl Chan of CFO Selections, nominated for Best Service Provider to Startups who helped us hugely these past couple of months. Voting is open through May 11, so vote now!

And if you’re at the Seattle 2.0 Awards ceremony on May 19th, our own Jonathan Sposato will be delivering the keynote, discussing his personal experience and offering his pearls of wisdom on the startup business in Seattle. We hope to see you there!

Team Picnik’s designers Peter, Michael and Kelcey are headed to Austin, Texas today for the SXSW Interactive conference. They’ll be found sitting in on talks like Beauty in Web Design, Long Distance UX, The Right Way to Wireframe, and Mind Control, Psychology for the Web. If you see them, say hi!

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

(more…)

It can be hard to keep up with what’s new here at Picnik. Unlike traditional software companies that put a new box on shelves every 18 months or so, we do updates every week! Sometimes they’re little updates, moving menus around or fixing bugs to make it easier for you to use Picnik, but other times it’s an avalanche of awesomeness. Here’s how you can better keep track of everything we’re up to here at Picnik World HQ:

If you have a Twitter account, and statistically speaking, you do, follow us @Picnik for all the latest feature updates, office shenanigans, promos and freebies, delivered instantly to your timeline.

And on Facebook, join the rest of our 173,000-plus fans for all those updates and the fun pictures that we make for just all you Facebookers too!

And don’t forget! If you have any questions or need any help, don’t hesitate to email our intrepid feedbackers at feedback@picnik.com! And of course we always read the comments here on the blog, too. Happy Picniking!

Team Picnik is heading to Sin City this week for the Consumer Electronics Show! Look out for the green grass, fluffy clouds and shining faces of the Picnik Booth in the North Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center. Kelcey (Junior Designer, Unicorn Enthusiast), Ali (Community Cultivator, QA Deputy) and Michael (Bolognino, Social Marketing Manager, second Michael and first Picnik employee who needs to go by his last name) will be on hand to demo Picnik’s awesomeness, so stop by and say hi!

Also, make sure you catch Picnik CMO and Bullhorn (and mom) Lisa Conquergood on a panel discussion talking about “Moms as Memory Keepers” on Friday at 1:00 pm with Jef Holove of Eye-Fi, Jennifer Smiczek of The Print Shop, Terence Swee of muvee, Neil Yarian of Pandigital, Susan Write of Smilebox and Suzanne Kantra of Techlicious.com moderating.

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.)

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.