Is OpenCalais Dead?

That was the title of a recent inquiry in our forums and a blog post by a potential user. It’s one of those catchy questions that can develop a life of it’s own - so let’s address it.

Here’s the executive summary: No. It isn’t dead. It’s alive and well and isn’t going away.

Now, a few more details. The OpenCalais team has always been open and transparent about what we’re up to - and we’ll continue that in this note.

Big technology projects seem to go through a standard life cycle. At the start there’s extraordinary energy and rapid evolution in response to user needs and generally cool ideas. That’s generally followed by a period where the capability evolves for the sake of evolution and innovation - rather than in response to what users need. Once you’ve evolved past the point your users care about, you have a moment of truth where you decide 1) our users are clueless, 2) maybe we’re doing something wrong.

We chose option 2.

For a couple of years OpenCalais evolved at an incredible rate. We had releases on a monthly basis and big new functionality every quarter. We spent about 80% of our time on the road evangelizing the capability and building our base of users. It was really fun. It was really successful. We process millions of transactions per day, power over 10,000 web sites and provide the technology that powers literally dozens of startups.

We followed that with a couple of major upgrades - in particular the incorporation of a whole Linked Data ecosystem underneath OpenCalais for companies, geographies, products and a few other things. We were really excited about this new capability and we invested a lot of money in making it happen. We released it to moderate fanfare and were ready for a wealth of innovation and new OpenCalais-powered capabilities.

It didn’t happen. We saw very little adoption and no fundamentally new capabilities being built. That caused up to step back and think about what we were doing. The conclusion was pretty clear.

We’d gotten ahead of what our users cared about and their ability to adopt to a constant flow of changes. It’s a classic trap for techno-heads. We were brimming with cool new ideas that we wanted to get built and we got ahead of what our users care about. So - we decided to slow things down and let use cases and the market for semantic extraction mature a bit. That’s what we’ve been doing. It’s happening more slowly than any of us expected back in 2009 - but it is happening.

We’re constantly tweaking OpenCalais for improved accuracy and performance. These are under-the-cover activities that won’t be noticeable for the majority of users. We continue to enroll hundreds of new users each week - some of whom are building really cool stuff. And, in the last couple of years, we’ve signed some really significant commercial agreements ranging from 100’s of thousands to millions of transactions per day.

So - stay tuned. OpenCalais isn’t going anywhere but we are waiting to hear a clear message from the marketplace on where it should go. I’ve personally been spending the majority of my time within Thomson Reuters as the head of product for the Reuters News Agency and Reuters.com. It’s becoming pretty clear to me that there are massive opportunities in the areas of news, its integration with social media and its utilization as a massive repository of knowledge. More to come on this in the future.

We’re here to stay. Any questions? Feel free to drop us a note at team@opencalais.com.

Tom