What do you get when you combine social networking, a course management system and a course search engine? Welcome Pyuple the next step in college social networking.
As a social network that caters to college students, Pyuple sees itself as providing a service similar to what Facebook gave up before it opened its doors to the general public. Unlike Facebook, however, Pyuple doesn’t require users to have a dot edu email address to accommodate the vast majority of colleges that don’t offer them to their students. In addition, Pyuple allows students to search for courses across multiple schools using a service powered by another startup called Courseopedia (www.courseopedia.com).
Courseopedia was also developed by Pyuple’s founder and CEO David Yahya. If a student is looking to take an accounting class, they enter the keyword, and Couseopedia will show them which classes schools are offering. Though in still in beta form, it shows promising results.
For educators Pyuple can help market their schools. Teachers are able to manage their courses and communicate with their students via a Web 2.0 platform. Instead of schools building their own network, they can use Pyuple to develop their online community. I can see smaller colleges taking advantage of this since there is not much a school’s IT department has to create and costs are minimal compared to others out there. Pyuple has started working with schools in the Bay Area and will be expanding in the near future.
