Photobucket wants to reclaim a spot at the top of the crowded photo and video sharing space, and it’s prepared to open its wallet to do so.

The Seattle-based company is actively looking at a number of potential acquisition targets, CEO Tom Munro told me in an interview this week. Photobucket is currently turning a profit and is “absolutely serious” about looking at bolt-on buys, he said, noting that the company would likely pay for deals with a mix of cash and stock. “We’re actually looking at a number of acquisition opportunities,” he said. “We’re not looking to acquire companies for user growth; we’re looking to acquire technologies.”

While Photobucket does not have much of a track record as an acquirer, Munro himself has both sell- and buy-side M&A experience. Most recently as CFO of photo software firm Ontela, he oversaw Ontela’s December 2009 acquisition of the Photobucket assets from News Corp.  Munro’s resume also includes time as CFO of software firm Vallent, where he handled several acquisitions before the company’s sale to IBM. He assumed the CEO role for Photobucket in October 2010.

The new focus on M&A is part of a larger strategy to aggressively add more user-friendly applications in the months ahead. Photobucket’s first step in this new direction came Wednesday, with the debut of an Instagram-like app called Snapbucket, which allows users to add filters and effects to photos and share them through social networks.

A lot has changed in the online photo space since Photobucket’s inception in 2003. Facebook is now far and away the Internet’s top photo sharing destination, with more than 2.5 billion photos being added to the site every month. The iPhone with its increasingly awesome camera capabilities has created a gold rush for mobile app developers and led to runaway successes like Instagram.

Meanwhile, Photobucket has had a rocky few years. The company was acquired by media conglomerate News Corp. for 0 million in 2007 , only to be sold off in late 2009 after suffering from highly publicized DNS attacks and reported failures in corporate integration.

Photobucket has spent the better part of 2010 “transforming” itself, Munro told me. “We brought in a new attitude and a new management team, and got the business back to profitability.”

In our interview, Munro made it clear that Photobucket is highly motivated to get back in the game. The ambition will probably come in handy for the company, which has quite a bit of catching up to do. Whether the innovation comes from building new technology or buying it, Photobucket’s big challenge for 2011 is getting up to speed in what is now a very competitive space.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

• A 2011 NewNet Forecast
• A 2011 Mobile Forecast
• Communications, Platforms, Privacy Ruled NewNet in Q4

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Russian investor Yuri Milner, the man behind the aggressive venture group Digital Sky Technologies, tends to let his money do the talking. He doesn’t make a lot of public appearances, but his significant investments in companies like Facebook, Groupon and Zynga — usually at very high valuations — are one of the driving forces behind the current wave of speculation around Silicon Valley and beyond.

His tactics, which seem to focus on buying into high-profile startups at almost any cost, have grabbed headlines and upset some of Silicon Valley’s longer-standing investors. In particular, they focus on moves such as his offer of 0,000 to every single company coming through Y Combinator, regardless of whether he’s seen the business or not.

So there were some high expectations when he arrived for an on-stage interview at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit. It doesn’t sound like it went down well, however.

By all accounts, interviewer Jeff Randall, a seasoned British journalist who covers the business beat, struggled to elicit much from a monosyllabic Milner.

“Curious” twittered one audience member. A “car crash” said another. David George-Cosh, a Canadian reporter with the National newspaper, went even further. “I strongly believe Yuri Milner is the worst interview subject in the history of the technology business.”

Still, the crowd stuck with it because they all wanted to know the answer to the question everyone asks about the DST boss: what can he see that we can’t? Gathering from what he did say, the answer seems to be “not much.” After all, Milner has a fairly good track record online (after a string of failures and moderate successes in Russia, he built Mail.ru into the country’s largest website), but his strategy seems to be simple: Bigger investments deliver greater rewards.

Here’s a mixture of direct quotes and paraphrases taken from reports of the event.

• “It’s not about revenues: the fundamental economics in digital business is scale and margins. The top line has become the bottom line.”
• “We have to be near the younger entrepreneurs because they are more disruptive.” By the time they reach 30 or 35 there are other factors they have to take account of in their lives (like families).
• The adults of tomorrow will have fragmented attention spans, multi-task, process more information and be interactive as a group.
• ”Amazon will be the largest retailer in the world in 20 years.”
• The next big trend will be curation. The amount of information online is like Moore’s Law, it’s doubling every 18 months. In the future, 50 percent of our consumption will be driven by personal networks, 50 percent by algorithms.
• “It’s not how much something’s worth today, it’s what it’s worth in five or 10 years.”
• “There are a probably a total of 25 companies in the world that fit our investment criteria.”
• When do you cash out? “I think you should at least wait until they go public,” he said. “When the founder starts selling, you should start selling as well.”

In a lot of these cases, it’s hard to see how Milner’s advice aligns with his actions. Younger entrepreneurs? Sure, Mark Zuckerberg and Groupon’s Andrew Mason were young when they started. Zynga’s Mark Pincus, however, is 45.

And the idea that just 25 companies fit his plans? Given that Y Combinator is putting 40 companies through in its latest boot camp, that seems odd — unless you count Y Combinator as an umbrella company for all the others (I’m not sure Paul Graham would like to see it that way).

Or when he spoke on the subject of exits? Well, none of DST’s investments have turned into exits, despite the fact that — particularly in Facebook’s case — some of the founders have been cashing out for years already (in many cases, specifically because of the money that DST brought to the table).

His other insights seem to be fairly straightforward: Fragmented attention, multitasking and Amazon’s continued success don’t exactly seem like radical bets. To be honest, I’m not sure what to make of it all.

Perhaps the real difference is not what Milner sees, or whether he has a guiding philosophy to picking his investments. Maybe he sees the same things as everybody else, but is happier with risks that others shy away from. Perhaps it’s just that when he sees an opportunity, he’s willing to pay more than others to be part of the game?

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

• Second Quarter 2009 In Review: NewNet
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• A 2011 Connected Consumer Forecast

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I’ll update – or shorten this list – as I work with the device.

Sticky fingers – The iPad screen is big. It takes lots of fingerprints. It takes a nice brushing with a soft cloth to clean.

Keep out of direct sunlight – As you saw from my photos, the screen washes out like mad in direct sunlight. It happens with the iPad and most laptops, as well, but you really notice it with the 10-inch screen.

iPhone Apps are annoying – Now I understand why I kept getting PR emails about iPad apps. iPhone apps on the iPad are either horribly dinky or horribly pixelated. There’s no real middle ground. Developers need to hurry up.

The iPhone UI doesn’t scale well – I don’t mind the UI, but it’s a little “spaced out.” All of those separate icons are a little weirdly “kerned” on the iPad screen.

HD apps are twice as expensive – Twice the pixels for twice the price? Come on, guys. This isn’t science of the rockets. Why do I need to pay $4 for an HD version of Fieldrunners? Gold rush much?

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