Kickstarter hits the UK with a £10,000 cup of tea

Kickstarter hits the UK with a £10,000 cup of tea
Good and proper, as all British things should be

Kickstarter is now live in the UK with one of the first projects seeking crowd-funding appropriately tea-related.

Now that the US site has made the leap across the Atlantic, you can fund and seek funds in sterling rather than dollars.

To submit a proposal for crowd-funding, you'll need to have a registered Companies House number as well as being over 18 with a UK address, bank account and ID.

Nice cup of tea

As well as the Good & Proper Tea project, which seeks to do for loose-leaf tea what Meat Wagon did for the consumption of animal flesh, one of the first projects on the UK site is a Raspberry Pi cabinet named Picade.

The Picade project was actually the first British project to land on the site shortly after midnight. Its creators are after £32,768 to manufacture desktop arcade cabinets for Raspberry Pi boards, which people can build from a kit at home.

We'll also be keeping a close eye on Yoda In Steel (Andrew Parker wants to build a steel sculpture of Yoda), 2D game development tool Objecty and lovely-looking film You wanna be a spaceman?.

Kickstarter has proven a phenomenal success in the US with several projects achieving funding of over $1 million; in total, Kickstarter says it has helped start-ups and inventors raise over $340 million (around £211 million) to date.

However, a successful Kickstarter is no guarantee of a successful project; one project, Haunts, recently raised $28,000 but it wasn't much use to the company behind it when the development team jumped ship.

News Editor (UK)

Former UK News Editor for TechRadar, it was a perpetual challenge among the TechRadar staff to send Kate (Twitter, Google+) a link to something interesting on the internet that she hasn't already seen. As TechRadar's News Editor (UK), she was constantly on the hunt for top news and intriguing stories to feed your gadget lust. Kate now enjoys life as a renowned music critic – her words can be found in the i Paper, Guardian, GQ, Metro, Evening Standard and Time Out, and she's also the author of 'Amy Winehouse', a biography of the soul star.