"Hooray!" write Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler, and Charles Adler of Kickstarter. Why? Because their crowdfunding website is coming to the UK.
Kickstarter is perhaps the best known crowdfunding site, but by no means the first. It's also not the first such site in the UK: it'll be competing with several others, such as PleaseFund.Us and Peoplefund.it (both ironically using foreign domain names ;-)
Beginning October 31, people in the United Kingdom will be able to launch their projects on Kickstarter. ... UK projects will be listed in pounds sterling. If you are pledging from outside the UK, you will see the approximate conversion rate to US dollars before you complete your pledge.
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Like the US, Kickstarter will charge a 5% fee to successfully funded projects and no fee to unsuccessfully funded projects in the UK. ... Payment processing fees for UK projects are similar to those for US projects. ... Pledges less than £10 are charged 5% + £0.05. Pledges of £10 or greater are charged 3% + £0.20.
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We’re really excited! ... We can’t wait to start backing your projects.
In fact, would-be UK crowdfundees don't need to wait until the end of the month. They can already get going building and finessing their project on the site. The end of the month is the moment when you can click Launch.
At times like this, I turn to my old friend, Richard Bliss, who helps entrepreneurs understand the whacky world of crowdfunding. In his analysis, the UK move is "great news. Kickstarter project categories have formed informal support groups between creators and backers but often those in the UK were not easily included. Now, using the Kickstarter brand as a gathering place, UK project owners will be able to build their own communities of support based in the UK."
Richi Jennings 
, editor of Input Output UK, is also an independent analyst, specializing in blogging, email, spam, security, and other technology topics. His writing has won ASBPE and Neal awards. You can encircle him at +richi, follow him as @richi on Twitter, pretend to be his friend at Facebook.com/richij or just use boring old email: io@richij.com.
