Piazza

History
The founder of Piazza is Pooja Sankar. After receiving her bachelors at ITT and masters at the University of Maryland she noticed that there was a lack of interaction between students outside of class. After working at Oracle, Kosmix and Facebook she decided to tackle this problem head on and  launched Piazza as a tool for students.

Audience
College students, TA’s, and Professors

Platform uses
This platform is used to help college students, TA’s and professors to get the help they need. It is a remedy for students who are not given intellectual space, freedom or support to fulfill educational and desire for learning

Number of users/other statistics
Currently there are thousands of students across hundreds of campuses using this website: 15,000 students at Berkeley, 14,000 students at Georgia Tech, ½ students at Stanford undergrads signed up for two terms, ½ MIT in one.

In the news/interesting facts
On November 18, 2011 a free app became available to iOS and Android users. A few months later, on January 6, 2012 Piazza secured $6 million in funding to transform learning. Piazza has real time updates, wiki-style editing and is programmed to never have the same question asked.

Similar platforms
Similar platforms include: Blackboard

Images
image slideshow here