Square, the mobile pay­ments tech firm with offices in San Fran­cis­co, New York, Water­loo and Cana­da, has announced that the team of engi­neer­ing wiz­ards behind the New York pho­to-shar­ing start­up Viewfind­er will be com­ing on board to help build up the firm’s pres­ence in the Big Apple. As any vet­er­an prod­uct man­ag­er can tell you, it’s the tech­ni­cal cre­ativ­i­ty that goes into a prod­uct that lends it mar­ket cred­i­bil­i­ty, and it looks pret­ty cer­tain from its Viewfinder’s engi­neer­ing tal­ent rather than the pho­to-shar­ing app itself that Square is eager to sign up.

From image edit­ing to mobile pay­ments 

Tech­ni­cal­ly-mind­ed prod­uct man­agers would agree that to call Viewfind­er a pho­to-shar­ing app is some­thing of an over-sim­pli­fi­ca­tion: it’s a GIMP open source image edi­tor, cre­at­ed by ex-Google engi­neers Spencer Kim­ball and Peter Mat­tis. Before co-found­ing Viewfind­er, they’d worked in Google’s NY engi­neer­ing office which pre­sides over much of the inter­net giant’s data infrastructure.

Announc­ing the new arrange­ment, which appears to be an acqui-hire, Square CTO Bob Lee said in his blog of his new­ly-appoint­ed senior team members:

“The team is incred­i­bly tal­ent­ed, hav­ing built an app that blends beau­ti­ful design and high­ly tech­ni­cal engi­neer­ing to cre­ate per­son­al, human expe­ri­ences. This too is our mantra at Square, and the Viewfind­er team’s exper­tise in build­ing sim­ple, ele­gant mobile appli­ca­tions will help us in our mis­sion to make com­merce easy for everyone.”

A prod­uct manager’s wager

Lee has known Viewfinder’s co-founders for some time, even while they were work­ing at Google, and he’s clear­ly excit­ed by the tech­nol­o­gy under their app’s hood. They’ll now focus on help­ing Square build its mobile appli­ca­tions from the expand­ing New York office (which is set to tre­ble in size), in par­tic­u­lar devel­op­ing “sell­er initiatives”.

One such is “Square Mar­ket” which allows users to shop online from local stores. The chances are that Square wants this busi­ness to grow big­ger – Mar­ket has been clev­er­ly opti­mized for tablets and smart­phones, so can­ny prod­uct man­agers can safe­ly wager that a new native app cour­tesy of the now ex-Viewfind­er team seems a near-certainty.

As for Viewfind­er, it’ll car­ry on sup­port­ing exist­ing app users but won’t issue any fur­ther updates, and there’ll be no fur­ther cus­tomer ser­vice (it’s no longer avail­able from iTunes).