Dive Brief:

• Two education technology entrepreneurs who recently graduated from the University of Arizona have launched a hybrid social network and learning management platform.
• The web application, called NoteBowl, was created to answer problems Andrew Chaifetz and Alex Slaughter encountered as freshmen at the university in 2010 — including having to learn several online systems to take classes, as well as their difficulty learning about campus events.
• NoteBowl was awarded an Edson Student Entrepreneurship Initiative grant from Arizona State University, and an angel investor, formerly of Microsoft, invested $300,000 in the company, Ed Tech Magazine reports.

Dive Insight:

Chaifetz and Slaughter, who have seven employees, launched a pilot version of Notebowl at the University of Arizona during the summer. The NoteBowl app includes a student planner, course catalog, friends list, bulletin board for news from faculty members, space for students to share updates, and a calendar of campus events and course milestones, replacing the need to manually sift through syllabuses. The app can be tied into the functions of a smartphone, and the NoteBowl calendar integrates seamlessly with Google Apps for Education.