Rentoid offers an eBay style variety of items, but with one distinct difference: the items are only available for rent.

The Melbourne, Australia based startup launched in beta last year and has slowly been growing its user base as it adds features and signs distribution agreements. Items for rent can be searched by type of item and location, and social tagging by members in encouraged.

Content comes from its user base and through agreements with rental companies; in Australia Rentoid has agreements with national rental providers including Coates, Kennards, and Radio Rentals.

Current rental listings on the site include private jets, Islands, Dogs, rubix cube, ladders, Ferraris, high end handbags, and more regular fare.

Rentoid currently has members in the United States, India, Singapore, China, Hong Kong, New Zealand and the UK (as well as its native Australia), and the platform supports dollars and pounds.

Zilok is a similar service we’ve covered before.

Over the past few days at the Next Web conference in Amsterdam, I had the opportunity to hang out with about 700 Internet entrepreneurs from all over Europe. The startup scene in Europe reminds me of Silicon Valley four or five years ago—hungry startups building Web companies on the cheap and products that scratch a personal itch.

Swedish startup Twingly, for instance, wants to come up with spam-free blog search by starting with the best 450,000 blogs and letting users share blog posts with each other. ParisBrussels-based Zilok is creating an eBay for renting things such as drills and digital projectors. London’s Fav.or.it makes a feed reader with extra powers—you can leave comments on blogs within the reader, it ranks posts based on how much they are actually read, and it lets you filter posts by tag, rank, or category. In Munich, andUnite has created a service that allows you to collect your search terms and share them with others.

And a handful of companies are even gaining substantial traction. I was surprised to learn that the social network Netlog claims 30 million unique visitors and four billion page views per month (comScore counts 11 million visitors, but five billion page views). Netlog operates in 15 different languages, and 20 countries. Then there is eBuddy, the Meebo of Europe, which boasts 12 million Web users and 1.6 million mobile users of its Web-based instant-messaging service.

Most of the startups I encountered, however, are still operating under the radar—in Romania, Sweden, Holland, Ireland, France. But a cross-border Web 2.0 culture is definitely gaining steam across Europe. Technology itself is helping to break down borders. A VC showed me the landing page on his mobile phone. It wasn’t his e-mail. It was Twitter. Another startup founder told me that Twitter helps him keep a dialogue going with other entrepreneurs and VCs across Europe, and even with contacts in the U.S.

Europe is still a mosaic of employment law, tax regulations, and cultural habits that can influence where it makes the most sense to locate different parts of a business. One Dutch CEO, for instance, told me that it costs you need a minimum of 18,000 Euros in starting capital just to incorporate in the Netherlands. And that is just the government’s fee.

When I asked which region was most likely to emerge as Europe’s Silicon Valley, the answers were all over the map: London, Munich, Berlin, Zurich, Geneva, even Barcelona. The money is in London, cheap office space is in Berlin, the mobile expertise is in Helsinki, the weather’s nice in Barcelona, and the inexpensive engineers are in Estonia (which may not even consider itself part of Europe, but is close enough to manage from Berlin or Amsterdam).

As Europe searches for its Silicon Valley, it may turn up as a state of mind rather than a specific place. The truth is that Europe may not need a single Silicon Valley because business is becoming so distributed. While some Silicon-Valley chauvinists may disagree, the idea of concentrating all the talent and capital in one region seems so last century to many Euro 2.0 entrepreneurs.

(Photo © Pieter Baert).

The idea is not brand new, and the name sounds like a french guy learning how to say something in English, but the execution is good enough to catch the attention and maybe even take some bet on the future of this french startup called Zilok. They basically offer a service where anyone can rent anything he/she owns to anyone. The service was launched in France a few weeks ago and opens tomorrow in the US (accessible at us.zilok.com). It has attracted so far a few thousand users and even generated some business. So now let’s see how it will work on the other side of the atlantic.

Here is how it works: Once registered on the website you can add any object you own for rental purposes. You define the price, the area you can cover, and the rental conditions (period, deposit,..). Zilok will issue for you a rental agreement that you will use directly with the renter. A user can use several tools to find what is searching to rent for including a search engine, a category directory or google map mashup. Once he identifies what is searching for (an example with a Wii here), he will contact the owner and the closing is not happening on the website but in real life. Zilok does not provide a payment system or a third party deposit service. But like on standard marketplaces they have created a reputation system to filter easily power-owners or power-renters and to optimize the process.

What is missing for me is a wizard to assist an owner in evaluating the rental price of his goods. If i know how to find a second hand price benchmark on the web (checking eBay for example) i would not know how to find the rental price of a piece of furniture (specially if it is unique). Zilok will not be appropriate for many categories of objects (cloths for example) and in many cases the rental price (even if rented several times) will not be a better bargain than just buying or selling the same product second hand or third hand. But i can see how this could catch with some product categories (some equipments and accessories, or utilities).

The service is open to both private individuals and professionals. I would tend to think that the big chunk of the business is on the second part and i think it will take some time before users get used to this new way of ‘monetizing” their goods. Not mentionning it requires a bit more logisitic than just selling over eBay (since the transaction is manual). The business model is based on the payment of a listing fee by the owner. Until 2008 the service is free.

RentMineOnline is another startup, winner of the Seedcamp startup competition is addressing the same need but building its service on top of social networks (they have a Facebook app) in order to solve the trust issue. Zilok claims that geographical proximity is the #1 trigger to make a decision. I think the truth is somewhere in the middle and that the online rental model is very likely to get a lot of fine-tuning until it finds its way. But it eventually will.

The founders have some good experience with MarketPlaces. Zilok is based in Paris, self-funded and has been created by Gary Cige and Thibaud Elzière, the founder of the online image bank Fotolia.com. For more details here is a full tour and here is their blog