Ad-supported photo editing tool

Just when Photoshop’s photo-editing software has become a household word, along comes a free online application that offers many of the same editing tools. By signing on to Picnik, the brainchild of a group of internet veterans based in Seattle, users can upload photos from their desktop and alter their colour, brightness and other characteristics. When done, they can post them on popular photo-sharing or social-networking sites. The tool is entirely accessible from a user’s browser—no need to download or install software. The free version of Picnik is ad-supported. But dedicated users can spend around US 25 for a one-year subscription to a more feature-rich, ad-free version. Picnik is the latest in a lengthy list of web applications that exemplify the concept of free love, which our sister site trendwatching.com examines in depth this month. In all likelihood, many more free-love applications will appear online. Two relatively new websites, overlay.tv and SmashMash.tv, for example, let users edit videos online. Short of creating an application yourself, one way to build a business around this trend is to aggregate the free applications others have built (provided their terms of use permit this, of course). A free suite of photo-editing tools, for instance, could be combined with free publishing programs to distribute the edited works when they’re complete. Spotted by: Bill McMahon