The company explained its decision in a blog post on the site:

“We have some bittersweet news. We are extremely happy to announce that salesforce.com has signed an agreement to acquire Clipboard, allowing us to pursue our mission of saving and sharing the Web on a much larger scale. But at the same time we’re also sad to see this stage of our adventure come to an end, especially since it means that our relationship with you, our users, will irreversibly change. As a result of this news, the Clipboard service at clipboard.com will be discontinued on June 30, 2013.”

I wrote about Clipboard back in September 2012 when it launched its iPhone app and new desktop design. At the time, I noted the similarities between the service and Pinterest, in that they both allow you to save items from across the web and organize that content into “boards.” The Clipboard service allowed you to save links in a way that made them private and fairly useful because of the amount of content that came embedded in clipped material.

“Anyone who’s used Pinterest before will feel immediately familiar with Clipboard — the design is almost identical to the Pinterest layout, with the option of grabbing material from across the web, saving that material to “boards,” and liking other people’s posts.

But Clipboard doesn’t seem like a site for wedding daydreams or fashion photos in the way Pinterest does. Clipboard posts, or “clips,” default to private, and unlike Pinterest’s static photos, Clipboard clips retain almost all of their original web functionality, making them seem more like helpful notes-to-self in the vein of Instapaper or Evernote.”

In the company’s closing post, it reported that the service only gathered 140,000 users who created about 3 million clips. By comparison, last August Evernote had 40 million users, up from 25 milion in May 2012.

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Based on what it’s seen from its users, the San Francisco startup considers collaboration a really big vertical, cofounder James Tamplin said in an interview.”Many people have tried to build collaborative text editors like Google Docs, but it’s really difficult. Users were using Firebase to synchronize their whole text block, but that’s not as efficient as Google Docs, which just syncs the changes,” he said. Figuring out how to just deal with the deltas and how to handle re-dos and un-dos when multiple people work on the same thing at the same time is a really hard problem.

“We actually replicated a full collaborative text editing library atop Firebase and are open sourcing it [under the MIT license],” he said.

As GigaOM has reported, developers use Firebase to easily create and debug web applications without having to worry about server infrastructure.

If several people are collaborating on a WordPress blog post, for instance, with a a Firepad plug-in, they would be able to work on the same document at the same time, with Firepad tracking edits and enabling re-dos as needed.

Atlassian is using Firepad in a plug-in for Stash, a tool for managing Git code repositories. That add-on lets different team members edit code together. and startup LiveMinutes is using it to build a way to pull content out of Evernote and work with that content collaboratively, Tamplin said.

What Firebase is doing with Firepad is similar to Etherpad, which Google bought in 2009. Firebase competes in a broader sense with companies like Pusher and Pubnub.

Being able to endow apps with collaboration is becoming table stakes for building the next wave of applications,  Tamplin said. “We want the next Twitter or Facebook to be built on Firebase,” he said.

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In other words, it is very mainstream and very big. And that is why Moleskine went public today on the Milan Stock Exchange. Its shares were priced at 2.30 euros a share. The company raised 245 million euros, or roughly $314 million. It is valued at roughly $626 million. Moleskin had revenues of 78.1 million euros and a profit of about 18.1 million euros in 2012. The stock jumped 3.9 percent today before falling slightly.

Here is a little background on the company from its prospectus:

The company grew out of the experience of Modo&Modo, a small Milanese publisher that in 1997 created the Moleskine trademark, rediscovering and renewing an extraordinary tradition. In the fall of 2006, Modo&Modo was purchased by SGCapital Europe, now Syntegra Capital, with the objective of fully developing the potential of the Moleskine brand. Since 1 January 2007, Moleskine has also become the name of the company that owns the worldwide trademark rights for the brand.  In the fall of 2006, Modo&Modo was purchased by SGCapital Europe, now Syntegra Capital, with the objective of fully developing the potential of the Moleskine brand.

The IPO is a windfall for Index Ventures, one of the investors in Moleskine. The company is making efforts to cash in on its tech connections. It recently partnered with Evernote for a smart notebook and also has started a community for Moleskine customers. By the way, all the cool kids are now using Field Notes, which is, well, cooler.

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The result, which launched in January, was Moxtra, a service for students and small businesses that combines collaboration capabilities with the ability to access data not only from cloud services such as DropBox, but also from the user’s desktop computer.

And now the company has made a big global push, releasing versions of the iOS app in 18 new languages, namely Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish and Vietnamese. This should help a lot more people join in the service’s collaboration aspect.

Moxtra has some pretty clever features on that front, starting with the range of things that can be rolled into these “binders” and the sources from which they can be derived: they could be photos from the tablet’s camera, or documents from the user’s remote desktop, or audio from a cloud storage account. In true Evernote style, web clippings can also be added. Updates from any member of the collaborating team will show up in a Facebook-like activity stream.

There’s also an ad-hoc meeting facility in there (again: WebEx guy) and the ability to share binders publicly or within a private group. However, the cleverest feature in my view is Moxtra Note, which lets you annotate files and binders with your voice (video is apparently also on the horizon, Iyar told me). You can then send out the annotated result to people who aren’t even themselves Moxtra users, who can then view it like a video clip.

With Evernote continually adding new features, and with rivals such as Wunderlist in hot pursuit, this personal information management space is getting quite frisky. Moxtra’s collaborative take gives it an interesting new avenue to go down.

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Among the new features, outlined in a blog post:

• Multi-shot camera mode “lets you take multiple photos in one sitting, then save them all into the note. If a particular photo didn’t turn out the way you like, then delete it before saving.”
• Page Camera mode is a scanning feature: Take a photo of a document or paper, and “the app will then find the edges of the page, remove any shadows and improve the contrast, so you’ll have the perfect photo in Evernote.”
• Shortcuts: Shortcuts, which let users “quickly jump to notes, notebooks and tags that you access frequently,” were already available on Evernote for Mac and are now on mobile for the first time.
• Enhanced document search for premium users: Search now includes documents, presentations and spreadsheets attached to notes, including “files created in Microsoft Office, iWork and Open Office.” (This feature is available for all versions of Evernote, not just Android.)
• The Android app now works with the Evernote Smart Notebook by Moleskine, which was introduced for iOS in August.

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Evernote Premium’s existing features include higher upload limits, offline note availability, added note-sharing options and better note search. But now Premium subscribers can also search documents, spreadsheets and presentations that are attached to notes, as long as the documents in question were created in Microsoft Office, Apple iWork or OpenOffice.

At the same time, Evernote also unveiled a major new version of its Android app, bringing a refined user interface and shortcuts that sync across devices, and also the Page Camera feature that iOS users got six months ago.

The initial result of the Telekom tie-in is not in itself unique by any means – many Orange and Taiwan Mobile customers, for example, also got a year’s free Premium access last year. However, the use of the term “strategic partnership,” along with the companies’ insistence that this Premium deal is only “the first part” of that arrangement, suggest more to come.

For Evernote, such deals mean more reach and entrenchment, which comes at an opportune time given Google’s entry into the same market with Keep and the rise of other rivals such as Wunderlist.

For Deutsche Telekom, the partnership is a continuation of the telco’s strategy of bundling the premium versions of popular web brands as a way of making its own services more attractive: it does much the same with Spotify for one of its youth-oriented tariffs.

“At Deutsche Telekom, we count on partnerships to pave the way for innovations,” Telekom business development SVP Heikki Makijarvi said in a statement. “Our goal is to offer highly innovative and unique services with the easiest access possible. The cooperation with Evernote is an excellent example of two companies combining their strengths for the benefit of our customers.”

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HashTag It: When talking about Twitter, the at-name and hashtag are its calling card. And last week, hashtag hit the big time when it was copied by Facebook. And yeah, Yahoo’s Flickr started using hashtags as well. Capitalizing on the organizational capabilities, Flickr has already updated its mobile platform to include the hashtag, while Facebook has plans to use them to group conversations in an upcoming facelift. The reason why people are falling in love with hashtag: it makes clustering of data easier, which in turn makes it easy to — guess what — inject appropriate (contextual) ads. HashTag is the new like, or whatever.

Kickstarting a Revolution? Lucky sevens again! A seven-year absence can’t keep “Veronica Mars” fans down — they helped to fund the biggest film project in Kickstarter history this week as The “Veronica Mars” movie raised its goal of $2 million in two hours. Some might say that the project will allow other beloved, canceled-before-their-time TV shows to continue their sagas on the silver screen, but some filmmakers are wary of the precedent this “little” project’s success is setting — asking fans to pay to get a movie made, then forcing them to pay again at the box office. It’s true that the movie’s production costs will be covered by the contributions, but after the wild popularity of the project, Warner Bros. has decided to green-light marketing and distribution costs. Obviously, this leaves a bitter taste in the mouths of artists, as “The Man” stands to profit from the films’ success, instead of the ones who opened their wallets to get the thing made in the first place.

Keeping It Real: Let’s just say we are smarting from the death of Google Reader and that is why we (and we are not alone) are wary of Google’s newest offering, Google Keep. Keep is a note-taking, Evernote-competing, web-clipping app that drops saved items into your Google Drive for storage, and syncs across all your devices for easy access. Sounds great, but we are staying away.

iWatch or iNot: We have been privately musing that Apple’s iWatch might just be a head fake, a way to throw off the rivals (and even insiders at the company) and send them on a wild goose chase. Our theory is that we might see something else that is along the lines of a watch, is wearable on a wrist and is focused on health. Why? Because we think that is a bigger market, regardless of what techno-watch wearing friends of ours say.

Apparently we are not alone in our conspiracy-theory like thinking. Jean-Louis Gassee (formerly of Apple) also mused about this on Twitter. He was of course reacting to this article about Google’s watch plans, just like Samsung’s watch plans. Not to be mean or anything, one has to wonder why Samsung (and Google) have not invented (or reinvented) a new category since you know, the iPad launch. Maybe waiting for Apple to announce something?

What can Google Glasses do? Open the garage door and handle the fridge, along with giving you a lot of details about people around you. We admit, we are GG nerds and will be looking forward to its release, for we know that our focus on keeping Google (or for that matter anyone else) on its toes doesn’t win us many friends.

Sean Gourley, Co-Founder and CTO, Quid Structure Data 2013 Albert Chau / itsmebert.com

Less data science, more data art: In 2009, when we started talking about using data to think smartly about the world around us, I (Om) pointed out that “data is the new plastic.” We can create nasty landfill or amazing furniture from plastic, and data is the same way. It has been a while, but finally people are glomming on to that idea. And it was the common theme at our fourth Structure Data conference in New York. Here are some standout ideas, tweets and comments: a tl:dr version of sorts for those short on time. We have all the videos and all sessions transcribed and packaged for you, and you can catch up with all of our Structure Data 2013 coverage here on GigaOM.

One session you can’t miss: a keynote by Sean Gourley of Quid, who stepped up to say: less science and more intelligence from data. I say, bring it on.

Plus here is what CIA knows about you, even when you think they don’t.

And now for the stories you might have missed:

• When is the Internet accelerator bubble going to pop, asks BusinessWeek. Good question, but we feel it might actually be happening, we just don’t see it as clearly.
• Whether you prefer digital or analog, The Atlantic offers eight tips on becoming a master notetaker.
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In this business, you can’t count on anything having longevity. To avoid new services that are likely to get shut down within a few years, you’d have to avoid every new tech product. Products and services lasting more than a few years are the exception, not the rule.

Fair enough! Except I didn’t say that.

This is what I said: It is hard to trust Google anymore to make rational and consumer centric decisions. I said — nuanced as it might be — that I don’t trust Google to introduce new apps and keep them around, because despite what the company says, these apps are not their main business. Their main business is advertising and search — regardless of whatever nonsense you might read. They will sacrifice anything and everything to keep those businesses intact. Sure, they embraced mobile advertising and mobile search, but that’s just the same business on a different device.

I am far more likely to believe in and use products that are the main focus of the company behind them. Online storage? Dropbox. Time-shifting web content? Pocket or Instapaper. Short form communication? Twitter. Baby pictures and wedding photos to make single people miserable (or happy for being single)? Facebook.

The point is that a company whose main focus is a specific service or a singular product, like Evernote, is far more likely to focus its energies to build a business around it and keep it around. And if in seven years (or seven months) they fail — hell, at least they went down trying.

Our company pays thousands of dollars for Google Apps and the reason we do is because it is a business for Google and it makes good business sense. I have no problem paying for Instapaper or Pocket or Dropbox or Skype or anything that helps me do my job. And if anything that starts out free (Dropbox did) and then wants me to pay for it (like Evernote), I don’t hesitate upgrading. Why? Because I want these guys to be around.

As the Google Reader example shows (and as Chris Wetherell told me in an interview), Google didn’t even try with Reader. It never gave us an option to pay, even though Google is willing to offer some paid services when it makes sense, like multiseat licenses for Google Apps.

As Marco said, in the end it’s always business. It’s just not Google’s business, so perhaps that is why we should shift our energies and attention to services whose business is the apps they want us to use.

That said, I don’t think Marco is that far off from my way of thinking. He wrote, “Investing too heavily in someone else’s proprietary system for too long rarely ends gracefully, but when it bites us, we have nobody to blame but ourselves.”

Isn’t that what I am saying? Albeit, with a lot more emotion?

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It might actually be good, or even better than Evernote. But I still won’t use Keep. You know why? Google Reader.

I spent about seven years of my online life on that service. I sent feedback, used it to annotate information and they killed it like a butcher slaughters a chicken. No conversation — dead. The service that drives more traffic than Google+ was sacrificed because it didn’t meet some vague corporate goals; users — many of them life long — be damned.

Looking from that perspective, it is hard to trust Google to keep an app alive. What if I spend months using the app, and then Google decides it doesn’t meet some arbitrary objective? Evernote has my data and frankly, I’m glad to pay them to keep it because they are who they are. One of the reasons I use Evernote is because it is their only thing. (For now.) Evernote is focused on making the service better. And it keeps that focus every year.

Evernote is like Derek Jeter, playing shortstop and trying to win every day. Google? It is the digital Mr. Ripley.

Sorry Google, but you might not realize that you are acting like the company you wanted to replace: Microsoft. The Barons of Redmond used to float products into the market — smart displays and weird stuff — that companies like Samsung and LG would put out in the market, only to yank them later. In the end, I stopped believing in Microsoft and shifted my dollars and attention to other brands.

And by the way – how is this app strategic for you guys and Reader is not? A little clarity would certainly be appreciated.

How about a pledge? If you build it, we use it, and you use our personal data to make your other products better or your ad sales executives richer, then you will keep it around.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Dano

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OpenTable is now built into Evernote Food so that users can book reservations directly from the app, the company announced on its blog. They can share recipes on Facebook, Twitter and via email. And people who already used Evernote to store recipes, but weren’t using Evernote Food, can import those recipes from Evernote into the Evernote Food app.

Evernote Food has also made some content deals in Asia: “Evernote Food lovers in China and Japan will also now be able to search recipes from top regional publishers,” the company noted.

Evernote Food relaunched as an iOS and Android app last December, beefing up its discovery features like an “Explore Recipes” tab and Foursquare integration. In that way, the app aims to compete with other food discovery apps like Urbanspoon. The recipe storage and sharing features are its answer to recipe-focused apps like Say Mmm, Paprika and Gojee, and aim to take advantage of the fact that a lot of people already use Evernote to store recipes.

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