Desmos began its life as Tutor Trove, LLC. Founded in 2007 by Eli Luberoff, an active tutor, avid programmer, and math and physics double major (read: nerd) at Yale, Tutor Trove’s mission was to help tutors bring their business online. The company was built around a browser-based collaborative environment for remote tutoring called a “virtual Whiteboard”. In October of 2010, the Whiteboard was named the Most Promising Technology Product of the Year by the Connecticut Technology Council.
Now, we’ve built Desmos to serve the wider educational marketplace. Improvements in our core technology have dovetailed with an explosion of educational hardware in classrooms across the country and around the world. Interactive Whiteboards (IWBs) now exist in 28% of classrooms and counting in the United States alone. Today, the problem isn’t lack of choices, but fragmentation – each kind of hardware requires a different kind of software if you want to create content optimized for IWBs.