Wavety.com

Google has announced the acquisition of the award winning online photo editing service Picnik as the internet giant ups the pace at which it snaps up promising startups.

The deal is Google’s eighth in seven month and bring Picnik’s CEO, Jonathan Sposato, back to the search giant. Sposato will overview the integration of the service with Google’s own photo service, Picasa.

The Seattle-based five-year old company alongside its 20 employees will be incorporated in Google’s Picasa department and is likely to become an even bigger threat to other online photo services like Photoshop.com.

Brian Axe, who is Google’s product management director, said in a company blog post that “Until recently, you had to edit your photos using client software on your computer” before adding that Google had acquired “one of the first sites to bring photo editing to the cloud”.

Amongst the recent purchases made by Google are social search service Aardvark, email startup reMail and mobile ad network Admob.

Google’s CEO confirmed earlier this year that it will be buying one small company per month and make one big acquisition every year or so.

As with previous acquisitions, Google has pledged continued support for existing individual customers as well as corporate ones, some of which includes Google’s direct competitors like Facebook or Flickr.

Originally published on ITProPortal.com