Rentmineonline.com is a new U.K. based start-up striving to create an eBay-like network to enable people to rent “things” to each other. We write about Rentmineonline, because we love the idea - despite some major pitfalls.

The concept of an eBay for rentals was one of the original business ideas we explored before we created FlipKey. We looked at the world around us and thought of all the great things we’d love to have access to, but were unwilling to purchase.

• A boat on a hot summer’s day with friends
• A power saw to clean up some fallen trees after the latest wind storm
• A hand bag, so my girlfriend doesn’t pay $500 for the latest craze that she will abandon in a month
• A car to do a quick grocery run

The fact is we as a society own a lot of stuff that we don’t often use. By creating a trusted network of members you can establish a cooperative that adds new meaning to the term ’social efficiency’.

With that said, if it was easy someone would have already done it. eBay evaluated this concept several years ago and abandoned it because of the inherent challenges. I had the opportunity to meet with Josh Koppelman of First Round Capital (and former Half.com and eBay fame) and he put it best, “to succeed you will have to inherently change human behavior.”

Josh is referring to the fact that we, as individuals, do not rent things to each other. Minus the obvious category of Vacation Home rentals, when’s the last time you rented a personal asset to a stranger?

Rentmineonline is not a crazy idea… In fact it won an investment award at SeedCamp (a European business competition) and was recently featured on TechCruch. However, Rentmineonline will have a tough road to glory. To succeed they will have to (i) build a critical network of people willing to rent things (ii) create a sense of trust out of the ether and (iii) figure out a way to monetize the process.

If they can succeed this will be a huge win for social efficiency, not to mention a very large business. As I finalize this post the market capitalization of eBay is only $49B.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 1:19 pm and is filed under Community, New Service Radar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.