ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 30 -- United States Patent no. 12,375,538, issued on July 29, was assigned to Salesforce Inc. (San Francisco).
"Ambient, ad hoc, multimedia collaboration in a group-based communication system" was invented by Daniel Stewart Butterfield (San Francisco), Tamar Yehoshua (San Francisco), Noah Weiss (San Francisco), John Rodgers (Vancouver, Canada), Kevin Marshall (Mill Valley, Calif.), Anna Niess (Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.), Pedro Carmo (Brooklyn, N.Y.), Ethan Eismann (Orinda, Calif.), Chris Willmore (Alameda, Calif.) and David Ly-Gagnon (San Francisco).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Media, methods, and systems are disclosed for ad hoc, ambient, synchronous multimedia collabor...