Posted by Jeff Lu on March 8, 2010
Congratulations to Jon Sposato, Darrin Massena, Mike Harrington and the rest of the Picnik team! Google announced the acquisition of the company last Monday (3/1). Picnik, the online photo editing service, is based in Seattle and was one of the last clients I worked with at my former employer, Cascadia Capital.
Some impressive stats on Picnik at the time of acquisition:
- Over a billion images have been edited on the site
- No institutional capital, bootstrapped with $1M of total funds raised
- Feb 2010 Unique Visitors: 16.8M, Feb 2009 Unique Visitors: 8.8M
- Profitable since we started working with them last year around March or April
When I met the team last year, I was struck by how the personality of the team really shone through the product. Jon is incredibly stylish and his background prior to Picnik was with Microsoft, managing the only team that was allowed to work off-site of the main campuses in a hip office in Pike’s Place Market. Jon, Darrin and Mike’s background has been with game development and consumer facing applications. This definitely explains why Picnik is so fun and damn easy to use.
I really love this article from TechFlash, reporting on the email that spawned Picnik. It’s a very thorough and well thought out business plan but an email like this is probably sent thousands of times a day. It’s extraordinary to see the execution of that plan and finally the fruition of all the years of blood sweat and tears manifest itself in the form of a successful exit.
Posted by Jeff Lu on April 8, 2009
By Scott Rosenberg
I was on Killerstartup.com today and the first company OrSiSo.com sounded interesting so I decided to watch a video about the product on the company’s website. In short, they are a social media aggregation platform, sort of like friendfeed but better. I forwarded the link to my coworker and I told him about the merits of the product.
Now you would think that the very next thing I did was use the product… but I didn’t because there was a problem. The product was absolutely free but I was still unwilling to use it because I had to DOWNLOAD it. I informed my coworker of this minor detail and his response was, “oh, in that case it’s not very interesting”.
WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by Jeff Lu on March 5, 2009
Nokia is teaming up with Sense Networks to collect people's offline behavior data
In the world of digital advertising, data is king. As each year passes and as technology and digital content improves, people spend more and more of their time engaged with their computers. In turn, Internet companies like Google have become more adept at collecting data from us, tracking our demographics and predicting our behaviors.
Despite the undeniable fact that we are spending more and more time online, we still spend a significant portion away from our computers. We travel, go shopping, go to bars, we exercise, etc. There are lots of things that we still do offline, thus there’s lots of data that companies cannot capture. This is where Sense Networks comes in.
WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
