Guest post by Graeme Thickins of Tech Surf Blog

At a recent Club Entrepreneur lunch in downtown Minneapolis, I had the opportunity to meet one of the cofounders of a unique startup. The name of that cofounder was Ion Skillrud, shown at right in the photo.  The name of his startup is Socurio, which is a new kind of "creative marketplace and community for fine art."  I learned his cofounder, Sasha Koehn (left in the photo), was based in LA.  I thought there must be an interesting story here, and I was right -- with both a Minnesota and Wisconsin connection.  So, when Ion followed up with me, I suggested the three of us record a podcast sometime -- which we were able to do yesterday, via Skype conference call.

What's really different about this online art marketplace is that it bridges a real gap the founders see between art and the consumer. The latter being you and me: admirers of art, but not artists ourselves. The vision for Socurio -- its differentiation, they say -- is that it's a "refined" art marketplace, where the art is already filtered by the community.

Other art sites are loaded up with all kinds of clutter.  Here, the big idea is this: the community is the curator. Art buyers are obviously a key target for the  site, but even those with just an appreciation and no big budget play a key role.  Because the really cool feature, the founders say, is that you don't just buy art on Socurio -- you collect ("celebrate") art, on your own page on the site, viewable by all visitors to the site. Anyone can join the site for free, and we also talked about the site's revenue streams, which include a share of transactions, as well as advertising.

So, take a listen to the interesting startup story of Socurio. And also hear about the first "ARTintended" event they held, which was their launch event in LA last week. The podcast is about a 20-25 minutes long. Here's the MP3 file: