Up until now, anyone with a creative project wanting to secure funding on the  platform Kickstarters had to jump through loopholes creating U.S. bank accounts and/or stateside partners. You could always “pledge to projects from anywhere — it’s only project creation that’s limited.”  But, as tweeted by the Kickstarter team earlier this month, as of Autumn 2012 this is no more. To understand their enormously successful business model here is a short quote from their site:

As you know, every Kickstarter project has a funding goal and deadline, both of which are determined by the project creator. When that deadline is reached, one of two things happens:

1. If the project has met or exceeded its funding goal, all backers’ credit cards are instantly charged and funds go directly to the project creator.
2. If the project has not met its funding goal, all pledges are immediately canceled. And that’s it.

Amazon Payments is the only processor that currently supports these requirements, and currently Amazon Payments does not support non-US recipients — meaning that you need a US bank account and address to launch a project on Kickstarter.

But since last year Amazon Payments have been rolling-out internationally which has no doubt made it easier for Kickstater to expand into the UK.

Good news for UK Artists, developers, entrepreneurs etc. Though, as would be expected, there are many other crowd-funding platforms available in the UK and Europe it would appear Kickstarter takes the biscuit – or if crowd-funding was an Olympic discipline it would be another Gold Medal for U.S.A. Just take a shufti at the Top Funded Projects Page for an idea of how well this platform is supported by a dynamic community of investors..

Crowd-finding is a powerful concept; one that is quite rightly receiving a lot of attention these days.The recent hullabaloo could be due for the most part to the astounding amounts of money pledged to projects on Kickstarters “…the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects.”