Picasa chief departs Google for Fetch

Mike Horowitz, product manager for Google's Picasa software for managing photos and the Web site for sharing them, has left the company for Fetch Technologies.

"Mike was a valued member of the Picasa team and Google, and we wish him well in his new endeavors. We have a talented team working on Picasa, and we're excited about the future," Google said in a statement. The company didn't say who would replace Horowitz.

According to Horowitz's LinkedIn profile, he began his new role in December as chief product officer at Fetch, an El Segundo, Calif.-based company founded in 1999. The company sells an artificial intelligence product called Fetch Agent Platform "for extracting and integrating information from multiple Web sources, and transforming the data into a form that is useful for business applications," according to the company.

Horowitz has held a variety of high-profile positions at Google, including the product manager for Google Apps and for AdSense. He also launched AdSense for Domains and Google's personalized start page.

In September, Google launched Picasa 3 with a variety of photo-editing features, including better retouching and the ability to make slide-show videos and big collages. On the Web end, the new service groups similar-looking people to make them easier to identify. And the software and Web site can stay synchronized so editing changes on a person's computer are mirrored on the Web site.

(Via The Inquisitr.)