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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I want to talk about the last thing I thought I’d ever want to talk about: Star Trek.

This is coming from someone who only, on Friday last week, AFTER seeing the new Star Trek movie on IMAX with Team Picnik, found out that it was a young William Shatner who played the original Captain Kirk. So you can tell that up until now I’ve managed to avoid all things Trek.

And yet I’ll be the first to admit that I totally loved the movie! I even walked away with a newfound crush on Spock (there’s just something about that inner struggle between logic (vulcan) and emotion (human) that gets me every time).

Star Trek is totally funny, slightly campy and 100% adventurous. It also delivers an important and (unfortunately) underused message. Oftentimes blockbusters like this are more singular in their nature, adhering to the all too familiar “hero’s journey”. The timeless story which revolves around one main character, who (with the help of a few quirky friends) is able to: self-actualize, win the girl and save the world.

Star Trek is different.

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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!

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!

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!