You could do this p2p without having to have a central storage of all the tools. Assuming the scale is large enough, there should always be things available that you want. That also covers deprecation in value. The central service could charge a small amount and handle disputes, etc, and come with ratings of how reliable someone is.
You could call it something like eBay.
Re:Uber for Everything
by triplepoint217 on Friday August 23, 2013 @02:39PM
(#6265469)
A less centralized version of that would just be to make it really frictionless to resell things.
So when I need the drill for once in a year, I pop uberlocalbuy, buy a drill from someone near me and either pick it up or pay for delivery.
After I am done with it, there is an easy way to immediately relist the drill (possibly with an automatically computed depreciation of its value), and then the next person buys it from me.
That's basically eBay + a tool to automatically create listings.
Why not pay the full price for the tool + delivery (handled by some monthly membership fee, maybe) to keep it as long as you like, and then push a button on your phone and someone shows up from the service to "buy it back" and return it to the cloud. You'd essentially be paying a deposit to cover the item, and then get the money back when the service got it back.
I'd liken this more to the original "netflix-for-everything", with a dash of exec/uber-for-everything.