Piczo was a social networking and blogging website for teens. It was founded in 2003 by Jim Conning in San Francisco, California. Early investors included Catamount, Sierra Ventures, U.S. Venture Partners, and Mangrove Capital Partners. In March 2009, Piczo was acquired by Stardoll. After the acquisition Piczo was led by Stardoll's CEO Mattias Miksche and his Stardoll team. In September 2012, Piczo.com was acquired by Posh Media Group. In November 2012, Piczo.com shut down. Their eponymous service, also called Piczo, was an online photo website builder and community, which was for the generation of free advertising-supported websites. Launched in 2005 Piczo allowed users to add images, text, guestbooks, message boxes, videos, music and other content to their site using plain text and HTML. Partners included YouTube, VideoEgg, Photobucket, Flock, Yahoo & PollDaddy. When it began, the company's focus was individual web-page design, and blogs were not included as a feature. In addition to the website development aspect of the site, Piczo once had a User Generated Content repository where users can browse, post, and consume content that they or others have used on their site. Later on, Piczo remodelled the entire site, and this along with many other features were no longer available. One of the features that stayed is "The Board" where Piczo informs users about HTML and Internet safety, though most pages are designed for the old Piczo. In August 2010 Piczo announced "Piczo Plus", a feature that allows users to buy an "ad-free" site, which is no longer available to purchase.
Popularity
Piczo saw around 10 millionunique visitors a month. While primarily offering services in English and German, Piczo was also available in French, Spanish, Romanian, Russian, Japanese, and Korean BETA versions. The service was very popular with a teenage audience in Britain, much like Bebo. Its popularity waned as social networking services such as Facebook, with the ability to create a profile, began to grow more popular than those where one would create a full-blown website.
