Salesforce Acquires Clipboard For More Social Skills

Salesforce has acquired Pinterest rival Clipboard as it looks to ramp up its social effort, and will shut the service down next month.

Founded two years ago, Clipboard has built up a user base of around 140,000, allowing them to “clip” things from the Internet in a single space, share them with others and then make annotations.

Salesforce splashes again

It hasn’t been able to keep up with the likes of Pinterest, but Salesforce has still decided to splash an undisclosed sum, believed to be in the tens of millions, on the company. Clipboard will be discontinued on 30 June.

Clipboard’s CEO Gary Flake will become VP of engineering within Salesforce, whilst other members of the engineering and design team will make the move across.

“They will be focused on expanding on our original vision in ways that could have never been pursued as an independent startup,” a note from Clipboard read.

It said that under Salesforce it would be able to pursue its “mission of saving and sharing the Web on a much larger scale”.

“But we have your backs. If you want it, all of your data will be preserved into a personal archive from which you can view your clips and boards offline. And if you want your clips destroyed, we can handle that as well,” the Clipboard team added.

For Salesforce, Clipboard will add to its growing social portfolio, which has been boosted by numerous acquisitions, including those of Buddy Media and Radian6.

The company told TechWeekEurope last week it was planning a major push in the Big Data space, saying acquisitions could be made in that market too.

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