Tradepal (est. in 2009) is an education technology company based in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

, California. The Company designs online tutoring software for

collaborative learning Collaborative learning is a situation in which two or more people learn or attempt to learn something together.Dillenbourg, P. (1999). Collaborative Learning: Cognitive and Computational Approaches. Advances in Learning and Instruction Series. New ...

to increase student success and retention in schools and colleges.

History

During their early initiatives, the Company developed technologies to facilitate the building of a proprietary interest graph leading to the discovery, sharing, and trading of items among like-minded people. The company developed a mobile application to provide students with a platform to support fellow students struggling with food and housing insecurity along with a growing number of campus initiatives including

Keep America Beautiful Keep America Beautiful is a nonprofit organization founded in 1953. It is the largest community improvement organization in the United States, with more than 700 state and community-based affiliate organizations and more than 1,000 partner organiz ...

with RecycleMania, Campus-based Food Pantries, and the

Food Recovery Network Food Recovery Network (FRN) is a student movement aimed to fight waste and feed people. It was established in 2010 by Evan Ponchick, Ben Simon, Mia Zavalij, and Cam Pascual, who were students at the University of Maryland, College Park The U ...

(FRN). Tradepal introduced its people-centric marketplace at the DEMO conference held in Santa Clara, California on September 12 to 14, 2011. The

peer-to-peer Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network. They are said to form a peer-to-peer ...

(P2P) product was well received by the Silicon Valley technical community, and was named one of the top 10 favorite startups at the DEMO Conference. As of April 2013 Tradepal.com offered P2P sharing of resources to college communities. Tradepal originally designed a P2P platform where counterparts would buy, sell and trade and ultimately take steps to reduce their

carbon footprint A carbon footprint is the total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions caused by an individual, event, organization, service, place or product, expressed as carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e). Greenhouse gases, including the carbon-containing gases carb ...

by promoting sustainable behaviors through

reuse Reuse is the action or practice of using an item, whether for its original purpose (conventional reuse) or to fulfill a different function ( creative reuse or repurposing). It should be distinguished from recycling, which is the breaking down of ...

. In 2014, the Company created a mobile-first application to engage students promoting

sustainability Specific definitions of sustainability are difficult to agree on and have varied in the literature and over time. The concept of sustainability can be used to guide decisions at the global, national, and individual levels (e.g. sustainable livin ...

on college campuses. The Company collaborated with student organizations located in California, Florida, and Texas who were part of the American College & University Presidents' Climate Commitment (ACUPCC) network of colleges and universities. In 2018, the Company transitioned into a

business-to-business Business-to-business (B2B or, in some countries, BtoB) is a situation where one business makes a commercial transaction with another. This typically occurs when: * A business is sourcing materials for their production process for output (e.g., a ...

(B2B) service where it develops educational, training and collaborative learning software platforms.

Original operations

Tradepal was made up of a core principle and multiple functionalities. Central to the experience on Tradepal is the social and interest graphs of the user, commonly called the Cluster of Friends, which includes both

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin ...

friends on Tradepal and Tradepal friends. The functionalities evolve around a User Profile that comprises the user’s Items, the Friends’ and Friends of Friends’ listings, the user’s Wishes and individual Carbon Savings Calculator. Both Profiles and Listed Items could be shared internally with Tradepal friends, or externally with Facebook friends and

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

followers. Users can trade with peers by instantly buying an item using the Buy Now option or by sending an offer using either cash and/or

barter In trade, barter (derived from ''baretor'') is a system of exchange in which participants in a transaction directly exchange goods or services for other goods or services without using a medium of exchange, such as money. Economists dist ...

Users can also communicate with one another using messaging, item comments, or

online chat Online chat may refer to any kind of communication over the Internet that offers a real-time transmission of text messages from sender to receiver. Chat messages are generally short in order to enable other participants to respond quickly. Th ...

. The concept of trust is based on both the use of Facebook identities as Tradepal identities as well as a rating system derived from all transactions conducted on the platform. All payments are conducted through

PayPal PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational financial technology company operating an online payments system in the majority of countries that support online money transfers, and serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper ...

's Adaptive Payments and benefit from PayPal’s Buyer’s Protection.

References

{{reflist Educational technology companies of the United States Companies based in San Francisco 2009 establishments in the United States Internet properties established in 2009

History

Original operations

See also

References