Going on one limb here - The vision of Clipboard per Gary William Flake (who is an awesome guy, btw) was laid out while he was working on similar ideas at Microsoft. There were already a few prototypes which I am sure, Microsoft (patent generating machine) would have patented. So, either Clipboard folks have filed a ton of patents as Gary continued to pursue relevant ideas at Clipboard, and are sitting on valuable IP, and SalesForce is buying IP + Gary + Team or just Gary + Team. Acquisition price would be higher in the former scenario (not sure by how much % though)
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How about that it's already built?
They're shutting it down, and AFAIK storage of information parsed from web pages isn't particularly proprietary.
Going on one limb here - The vision of Clipboard per Gary William Flake (who is an awesome guy, btw) was laid out while he was working on similar ideas at Microsoft. There were already a few prototypes which I am sure, Microsoft (patent generating machine) would have patented. So, either Clipboard folks have filed a ton of patents as Gary continued to pursue relevant ideas at Clipboard, and are sitting on valuable IP, and SalesForce is buying IP + Gary + Team or just Gary + Team. Acquisition price would be higher in the former scenario (not sure by how much % though)