Google has bought online photo editing suite Picnik, in a bid to bolster the capabilities of its existing image altering and photo-sharing software Picsa. Formed in 2005, Seattle-based Picnik works directly with online photo libraries such as Flickr (owned by Google’s rival Yahoo), Facebook and Picasa web albums. Users can also upload files to the service and download them again when they are done. The 20-strong team will start working on Picasa, Google’s online photo sharing service.
02/03/2010
The move comes as Google blazes an acquisition trail. Since September 2009, Google has bought eight companies, introduced a social network named Buzz and threatened to pull out of China.
Last month, Google bought social search engine Aardvark and mobile e-mail service reMail.
It also said it would become a network provider, offering super-fast broadband to thousands of US homes.
In October, Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said the company would resume its historic pace of acquiring one small company a month on average, with larger deals happening every year or two.
Neither Picnik nor Google provided financial terms of the deal in their blog posts announcing the deal.