Dive Brief:

• Noodle Markets has announced a new online marketplace meant to revolutionize how educators and districts purchase ed tech, calling it a “one-stop source of comprehensive information about the vast array of paid and free educational tools.”
• Noodle Markets is slated for a 2016 launch and is focused on K-12 educators in particular, bringing diverse vendors/sellers together with education buyers under the leadership of former Pearson exec Nicole Neal.
• The marketplace will also offer support to purchasers by streamlining procurement, such as boilerplate RFPs and a bid creation and communication platform for K-12 educators. 

Dive Insight:

“This is a win for education across the board,” said Noodle founder John Katzman, who also founded the Princeton Review and 2U. And it certainly could be. By removing some of the laborious R&D that goes into discovering new ed tech products and tools, educators and districts could potentially save both time and money by utilizing this new marketplace.

Though Noodle Markets says, via press release, that the marketplace will “give educators access to data that they’ve never had before” while making purchasing easier, the company has not yet said what kind of data is planned for release, aside from pricing and the vaguely-described “unbiased third-party information.”