Pixoh

Sector: online picture editor
Headquarters: Silicon Valley
Management: Beau Hartshorne
Funding: Private (as in, two guys run it)
Secret Sauce: No downloads, integrates with flickr. Espouses the philosophy of Keep It Simple. You can try a sample edit right on the site — a great idea since most people are too busy (lazy) to get a photo, drop it in there to try the service without any kind of commitment and some instant gratification. There’s basically four things you can do to your photo — resize, crop, rotate and adjust (brightness, saturation, etc.). That’s pretty much all most people need to do to their photos, so Pixoh has the streamlined idea down. Of course, it’s great that you can do it all in your browser. And a great bookmarklet that lets you drop any picture from the web into Pixoh and mess with it a bit. On the site, the Pixoh guys ask you to request features! Interesting idea that lets early users help shape the service. Maybe Yahoo! can buy Pixoh and just stick the stuff into flickr? There is probably a good reason why these edits can’t be done inside flickr already — I’ll have to ask Cal about that. (Just kidding, Cal. I’m only name-dropping to sound cool.)
Seen and Heard: Not too much press as of yet, but a glowing blog review called “How do I love Pixoh, let me count the ways.” Some good quotes from Hartshorne in The Stanford Daily about starting a company. (The article is about Startup School.)