Venture Spotlight: Picnik

One of the best ways to support your local entrepreneurship community (and venture capital community) is by using their services if they’re useful. One of the most promising Seattle-based ventures is Picnik.

Picnik is an AJAX/Flash in-browser photo editor, and, though it isn’t as powerful as Adobe Photoshop, it’s arguably much simpler and convenient, especially for non-professionals. It’s got a beautiful interface and it integrates with Flickr/Facebook/Picasa/Photobucket/Webshots albums for simplicity. Flickr has actually chosen Picnik to be its sole image editing tool.

The basic tools I tried got the exact result I wanted, and I was able to export into any common image format. Picnik hopes to make money by charging $24.95/year for its Picnik Premium service, which adds more fonts, editing tools, shapes, and effects to the basic tool. Considering that Picnik doesn’t require any software downloads, is easy to use and is well integrated with people’s photo storage partners, Picnik will probably do quite well if they can continue to advance their offering and define themselves as the premier in-browser image editing solution. One of their only competitors to date is Berkeley, California-based FotoFlexer, which also has a great in-browser editing suite and a healthy number of users.

Picnik is self funded to date, but may be open to taking on some money in a venture round at some point, as some journalists have noted.

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