Kickstarter expanding to Canada this summer

Crowdfunding Web sites in Canada will have a big competitor in the market space later this summer when New York-based Kickstarter expands its services north of the border.

The site, Kickstarter.com, allows entrepreneurs, artists, and do-gooders to raise funds for their projects by constructing elaborate Web pages and rewarding contributions with perks or rewards. It announced this morning it will be opening up to Canadian-based projects. A splash page says that will happen this summer and allows interested Canadians to sign up to get notifications about the launch.

Kickstarter representative Justin Kazmark spoke with Metro News today and said Canadians would be able to start building campaign pages within the next couple of weeks. The Canadian projects will be a part of the same site as current campaigns.

The move follows Indiegogo’s expansion into Canada last December. The site now allows campaigns to use Canadian currency and offers a geographic-based search feature so Canadians can find local projects. Indiegogo offers crowdfunding campaigns in the same style as Indiegogo and has traditionally been used by independent artists. But some entrepreneurial Canadians have used the site to launch businesses.

The most famous campaign on Kickstarter with a Canadian connection is the Pebble smart watch, founded by University of Waterloo graduate Eric Migicovsky. More than 67,000 backers contributed to the project for a total of more than $10 million, well exceeding the campaign target and breaking Kickstarter records at the time. But Migicovsky had to transfer his corporation to the U.S. in order to launch the campaign and now runs his firm out of Silicon Valley.

Join us today at 2:00 PM ET for a Twitter chat about crowdfunding! Just follow the #itbcrowdfund hash tag on Twitter.