Want inexpensive customized art, browse hundreds of styles, and have it delivered to your doorstep anywhere around the world?

Singaporean start-up Phokki, whom I wrote about before, just launched their customized digital art marketplace early this month, a world’s first, according to founder Sean Seah.

Phokki used to be an art e-commerce site with a few artists in its stable a few months back, but now it is a complete end-to-end marketplace — a concept that the founders wanted from the very beginning.

The idea is simple: inexpensive customized art from a banquet of art styles to choose from.

Get artists to come aboard from worldwide, and let them set their own price, production times and review options. The customer sends in a photo to be styled with a corresponding brief. Phokki manages the platform, and any physical prints and delivery within the time stated. Phokki also takes 30 per cent of what the artist charges.

Here are some art style examples. The idea speaks for itself:

A good marketplace is one with many choices, and in this, Phokki succeeds with a big diversity of artists, styles, and price options.

Thus far, Phokki has registered hundreds of artists, each bringing with them a couple of styles each. When I last talked to Sean early last week, the number of styles numbered around 500, but with the additions daily, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it hit the low thousands by the end of this month. Prices for art varies widely: from a few thousand to even free, depending on the art style and artist.

The best ideas are those that don’t need much explanation, and I think Phokki falls into this category. It’s easily grokked by people who visit the site for the first time. And as the artists and customer references have shown, it is applicable to a global audience.

The site still needs some polishing, and one area I hope they will look into is in making it more user friendly for customers, especially in browsing and search. As a customer, I would like to be able to search by price, or to have a search bar for genres/artists/styles. They are currently experimenting with user voting — a thumbs up from me — and how to make the site more user friendly.

In a nutshell, I think Phokki is a great concept. It has potential, and I hope this Singaporean start-up does well.

Bruce Branit’s nine minute World Builder short film is poignant, brilliant and beautiful. A work of art that fires on all cylinders — concept, storytelling, music.

If you’re a sci-fi fan or computer geek, it’s definitely worth a look. Super cool.

The story of how World Builder became a viral internet video is also pretty interesting. According to this excellent story on NewTeeVee by Wagner James Au, Bruce sent out his video last year to various film festival circuits, but it drew little attention.

Dejected, he put it up on the internet as a portfolio, and a high quality video was put on both Vimeo and YouTube about a month ago. Within days it became a viral hit and spread via word-of-mouth and blogs (like this one here!). It is still drawing traction, as the Viral Video Charts can attest.

Singaporean start-up Phokki allows you to do just that. All you need to do is browse for a styling option, submit your photos, and you’ll get the art in your email in-box within three days.

Below are some examples:

Phokki, the first-prize winner of Start-up@Singapore 2008 contest, has a product that both serves a need and makes business sense to me.

The web platform is a great digital shop space for a service like this. Everything is transacted through the web (no inventory or shipping costs!), Phokki gets a worldwide audience, and they can source for artists from all over the world.

Printing the art onto a physical product — mug, T-shirt, etc. — is left up to local printers (or through a partnership with Zazzle). Smart, because the printing business is so commoditized it’s hard to get into unless you have lots of scale.

However, the crux of Phokki’s value is in how good their service and artists are. Apart from this, the business model is easily copied, and there’s lots of competition out there by independent artists. Still, judging by the comments left on Phooki’s site by customers so far, the quality of the art is quite good!

Note: I’m always on the lookout for interesting Singaporean tech start-ups because of my interests and work as a freelance writer. If you have something interesting to showcase or share drop me an email!