Google's New Photo Editor
Web app Picnik may be integrated with Picasa.
Erica Naone 03/01/2010
- 2 Comments
Google announced today that it has acquired Picnik, a company that provides a fully-featured Web-based photo editing application. This is the latest in a recent string of acquisitions that has also seen Google snap up the social search site Aardvark.
Picnik is a flash-based photo editor capable of real-time cropping, resizing, rotating, special effects, and other manipulations. It can pull photos from websites including Picasa, Flickr, Facebook, and MySpace, or from a user's computer. The basic service is free, but the site offers a more sophisticated service for about $25 a year.
Google most likely wants to beef up its online photo-sharing service, Picasa, which currently has fairly minimal photo editing capabilities. It says it's not changing Picnik yet, but will be working on "integration and new features."
Other online photo editors include Photoshop.com, Aviary, and FotoFlexer.
On Twitter
Become a Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to the Feed
Mark Bruce
9 Comments
Strategic Acquisition
I think this goes beyond just beefing up Picassa. The acquisition of Picnic appears to be an excellent strategic fit with Google's over-arching goal of migrating users to a web-only system, for example by using their Google Chrome OS - soon to be launched on the first consumer products such as laptops and tablets.
To help convince users to switch to Google Chrome OS - and everything that entails - Google needs to offer as convincing a value proposition as possible. Having an excellent web-only photo-editing application ties in very closely with this because one of the main things people like to do with their computers is touch up and edit their photos. Users need to know that a good option is there for them - photo editing wise - if they are to make the switch to a system where they can't install any (photo-editing) software.
For this reason we can probably expect Google to develop Picnic further so that it functions while people are "off-line".
And we can also expect Google to acquire other strategic assets of this nature. For example, things that include online storage, music streaming / editing, gaming portals, etc. (Might be a good idea to acquire a few shares yourself in companies like this perhaps?)
I'll be making the switch - will you?
Reply