One rainy night in March 2013, an American student, David confided in a friend about an idea he just had. It was at a boat party, David was quite inebriated. But he was worried since mid terms exams at his university were almost upon him and he was missing class notes.
So he said to a friend, “What if there was a website where one could upload their notes and the other could just download them by simply searching for a few key words? It would save so much hassle from photocopying and printing and scanning. What do you think?” The rest, as they say, is history. David teamed up with 3 of his friends, called the project NoteRaid and launched the website exactly 6 months later after spending a lot of money, time and commitment to making it work.
So what is NoteRaid? NoteRaid is a note-sharing service designed to provide free notes to its users. The concept of NoteRaid is simple. You can upload your notes to NoteRaid and by filling out the NoteRaid search engine, your classmates, friends and everybody else searching for notes from your class would be able to access them. The best part? This is all for free!
On the website, the developers of Noteraid wrote, “What makes us think that people will upload their well-written notes to our website, for free access to anyone in the world? Well, we trust a human being’s ability to do good – not just for their friends, but also for strangers. Imagine how many students you will be helping out by simply clicking an upload button from any classroom or library in the world.”
They explained further, “Noteraid is not just about providing free notes to people all over the world, it is also an effort to save trees by cutting out on the usage of paper. Today, as everything is getting more and more digitalised, we asked ourselves, why not class notes? So remember this: each time you upload your notes to NoteRaid, you will be helping out the environment by saving a lot of paper from unnecessary printing. Noteraid accepts .doc files and pdfs and soon we will have the option of uploading audio notes as well.”
The four developers of the website were quick to dissociate themselves from plagiarism. “We strongly advise anyone against plagiarism and request you to not bother putting up someone else’s notes and claiming them to be yours. The users of NoteRaid would have a report button, which they can click to alert us to any material that should not be up on the website. For a better experience, there will also be a rate button on every uploader’s notes so that users can rate the quality of notes they will be downloading.”
The story of NoteRaid coming together is reminiscent of Zuckerberg’s Facebook. Within hours after launching the website, the website starting receiving hits from various countries including France, Pakistan, Italy, Egypt and the United Kingdom. The idea is simple and creates a niche for itself in the world of internet giants like Facebook and Google.
Talking to Pakistan Today, David Deryder, CEO of NoteRaid, said, “I am very hopeful about the future of NoteRaid. As students, we could only put up so much in this. None of us had a programming background. So with whatever little resources we had, I think we did pretty well.” Furthermore, talking to Pakistan Today, Rimka Sandhu, the marketing executive of NoteRaid said, “We have great plans for NoteRaid. We’re focusing on expanding the website via users, but in the near future, we have some exciting new things planned.”
NoteRaid, a social network for education?
