via Aviary

Aviary has done pretty darn well for itself in the four months since launching its mobile SDK. In a blog post announcing a new version of its embeddable photo editing software for web and mobile, the puppy-obsessed startup shared some noteworthy stats. Aviary is now editing more than 10 million photos were month on mobile alone and picked up 300 partners through its API. Both in terms of unique users and edits, the company is growing at 50 percent a month.

The Aviary blog features a number of luxe screenshots of what the updated user interface, which includes enhanced speed, sleek dials, overhaul of its cropping tools, and more effects, will look like. But Betabeat spoke to Alex Taub, head of business development and partnerships, to get the full story about the upgrade, which also includes some attempts at monetization. In the meantime, if you want to start playing around with it, Pic Stitch will be the first partner to implement and go live with V2.

For those that aren't familiar, Mr. Taub offered a handy summary of how the company evolved from a destination site to an API for web and mobile. Aviary began with funding from the likes of Jeff Bezos and Reid Hoffman to back a founding team that wanted to build Abobe Photoshop, but in the cloud. "While that was going well," he said. "It was built in Flash and we didn’t have a solution for mobile."

"We saw a lot of people use Photoshop, but it is an advanced skill to have," said Mr. Taub. "So we took sort of the good stuff out of it. We said, we want to be around in five years, so we need shift gears. We’re focusing on professional consumers and advanced suite and we need to focus on consumers, developers, and mobile." Rather than limiting Aviary's tools to its own site, "We said, why don’t we take out the best things in our advanced suite, which was effects, and cropping, and rotating, and brightness and stickers—why don’t we take that out and make it into a lightweight editor and put it on third-party sites."

The web API came in Thanksgiving 2010 and the mobile API in 2011. After that pivot, he said, "We went from a good business to a better business."

Bigstock, Ning, Imager, FriendCaster for Facebook, RockMelt, Fashism, and Halftone are all current Aviary partners. Companies that use the Aviary API, he explained, don't need to be photo-centric, rather any platform that allows users to upload photos. "If you’re a dating site, maybe you want to do red eye removal, brightness, cropping, rotating. If you’re a blogging platform, maybe you want stickers, effects, and drawing," said Mr. Taub. "It really takes a full company working on it to build the tools right." With the new version, the Aviary branding is less prominent so that users to have a more seamless experience.

As we spoke, Mr. Taub demonstrated the incredibly easy-to-use dials to adjust brightness. "This is me adding effects in real-time. It’s sick." The brightness dial in particular, he noted, is "ten million times cooler for mobile" and vibrates as you move right and left. "Honestly, we put this in the partners hand and they smile." The best, however, may be how well it works with crappy photos. "Auto-enhancing, night-enhancing, backlight balance, it’s all one-click magic."

Meanwhile, he pointed out, competitors like Picnik, which was purchased by Google, have yet to release a mobile version. Although Aviary sees its biggest competitor as the actual tools in your smartphone, although iOS 5 cropping tools, for example, are still without an interface for developers.

As far as potential new revenue stream, the tool will still be given away for free to developers, but Aviary will start offering premium content like virtual goods on top of its editor to help partners monetize their users. That includes effects packs, sticker packs, and branded sticker packs. That includes "grungy" and "nostaglia" effects, themed stickers for particular holidays and, potentially, partnerships with big brands like the NBA or MLB. Another potential monetization strategy is printing, but right now the focus is on premium content.

"When you’re doing 10 million photos a month, if you can start converting a certain amount of users into buying stuff, it gets really, really interesting," said Mr. Taub, who pointed out that Zynga only converts 1 to 5 percent of their users. In an email to Betabeat, CEO Avi Muchnick said, "I'm most looking forward to seeing our in-app purchasing capability beginning to roll out across our entire developer network."

Mr. Muchnick, right, with some unidentified broad.

Aviary, the  Made in NYC startup behind a robust suite of editing software,  announced the release of an iPad SDK today. It's been just a few weeks since Aviary launched its mobile SDK. But as AllThingsD reports, the iPad SDK as well as several new API extensions represents a big pivot away from Flash.

In fact, although Aviary started out by bringing Adobe-esque multimedia editing to Web browsers via Flash, CEO Avi Muchnick says Aviary will no longer be adding to that tool set and will instead focusing on mobile. "It wasn't part of the road map for the company,"Mr. Muchnick told Betabeat. After watching mobile  grow to 50 percent of overall Aviary usage in just a few weeks, it appears the company is onto something big.

"There was  definitely a shift where more creativity was happening on mobile devices, it just meant that we had to pay more attention to what you could do on mobile apps. Obviously Flash wasn’t working on iOS and iOS was making up a huge percentage of the amount of creativity happening," explained Mr. Muchnick. "I’m not gonna say that Apple forced the decision for us because it’s not entirely true, but I think regardless it would have made sense if we’re developing apps for iOS to develop them on Apple’s native code. We did the same for Android."

However, Mr. Muchnick noted, the shift isn't entirely towards mobile, pointing to the HTML 5 editor Aviary offers on the web. But going forward, he said, "Everything we do is either platform-specific or completely agnostic. There's no proprietary owner of any of the platforms we develop for."

The decision to stop developing for Flash also had to do with performance. "Let’s say Apple allowed for Flash to be deployed on iOS devices, we probably still would have built our apps in Objective C, which is Apple’s native code, just because it would have performed better," said Mr. Muchnick. "Whenever you’re using Flash, you’re basically running it in a virtual machine on your computer. It means there’s a hit in terms of performance because you’re creating a virtual operating system that then runs the Flash software.  So it’s better to just run the software directly on the processor."

For now, the pivot towards mobile also means prioritizing partnerships. "The way Aviary works now is instead of being a destination site that users go to, we partner with other existing apps that have existing user bases," he said. "So we don’t have an Aviary standalone app yet, but right now we’re really focused on helping out our partners."

Where Aviary had 30 launch partners for its iPhone app, the iPad SDK is launching with only two. But Mr. Muchnick said that had to do with the device being less-associated with photo sharing, "You do have a camera built into the iPad 2, but people don’t really use it for that." Nonetheless, he expects those same iPhone partners to update their offerings using Aviary's API, so that if users access the partners' apps on an iPad, they'll get an iPad specific version.  Sounding optimistic, he added,"I’m curious to see how it will perform. I’d expect more of the same."

Eric Litman

"Adobe is embedded in the creative community," says Medialet's CEO Eric Litman. "But there is a bunch of work to be done. Flash isn't going to go away anytime soon and iOS isn't going to open up to Flash."

The solution? Adobe is bringing on Medialets to power its rich media ads. "It's a deep integration, right into the workflow for InDesign and other publishing tools."

Adobe's future as the center of publishing is still unclear. Apple's near complete control of the tablet market means they may have enough leverage to force a shift in strategy away from Flash completely.

But in terms of selling these same firms on their own branded advertising Apple is clearly having trouble. They just cut the price of an iAd campaign in half. And as Betabeat reported earlier, Medialets is winning customers even among Apple faithful like News Corp's The Daily.