Kickstarter is about to launch in Germany

Kickstarter will go fully live in Germany on May 12. This follows its launch last November in Ireland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden. The site will be in German and take pledges in euros. Germany is Europe’s largest economy, so this is a big new market for Kickstarter.
Germany will be Kickstarter’s 11th country.
As evidence of demand for the site, the company’s blog post on the expansion points out that some “enterprising” Germans have worked through people in other Kickstarter countries to run successful campaigns:

They put a photo exhibit on the Berlin Wall and made cookbooks, art, films, new typefaces and even the world’s longest marble shoot! But today, we are finally here to serve the German community in a complete way — our site is in German, you can start a project in euro, and we’re throwing a great series of initial events for German creators.

Kickstarter will not be entering an empty field, however.
Crowdfunding platforms already exist in Germany, such as Startnext and Companisto. German crowdfunding has a wrinkle that American sites don’t have: equity crowdfunding is possible there. Companisto provides equity-based services and others do as well.
That’s the area that Quire (formerly Alphaworks, which helped fund a round for Gimlet Media) is setting itself up to move into, as regulations from the JOBS Act make it more feasible.
Indiegogo got there ahead of Kickstarter, apparently, as this cool image stabilization device for handheld video shooting, Luuv, was successfully funded with an Indiegogo campaign.
According to a spokesperson, this is also the first new country to launch since Kickstarter switched payments over to Stripe in January, from Amazon Payments. Using Stripe allows Kickstarter to accept payments on its own platform, without a separate login to Amazon’s system