Tom Tague, leader of the Calais Initiative at Thomson Reuters here.

First, thank you for taking the time to investigate Calais and write such a thoughtful posting. 99% of what we see is some flavor of “Cool..here’s a link” – you actually take the time to address some substantive points.

I’m going to respond with a few observations.

First, Calais and its associated tools are in a period of extended “hyperdevelopment”. We released the first version of Calais in late January and have released two significant updates since that time. We also have a major update scheduled for release on 5 May. That’s the commitment we’ve made to ourselves – new functionality delivered to the end user every month without fail. Our development activities focus on two core elements: 1) developing or sponsoring the development of an entire ecosystems of tools from sample applications to WordPress and Drupal modules to code libraries – all with the intention of making Calais accessible and relevant to a broader audience, and 2) Improvements in the core service itself. With each release of Calais we add a significant number of new entities, facts and events in existing and new domains. Starting with our next release the rate at which we roll out new elements and domains will begin to accelerate even faster.

Second, you bring up the point of commitment on the part of Thomson Reuters. As you mention you’d be reluctant to build a business on top of the service. We’ve learned something interesting over our first few months of operation: you can deploy a free service, you can deploy it for “web scale” volumes, you can tell people you’re committed for the long run – it just doesn’t matter. Unless you’re prepared to back that with contractual commitments of performance and availability prudent organizations are not going to bet their businesses on it. We heard. We get it.

So – we’re going to do just that in the very near future. In addition to the current service we will offer a version backed by a contractual agreement specifying reliability and long term availability. We haven’t settled on pricing – but it will be modest. Very modest.

Before a few thousand people say “Aha.. I knew the free service was too good to be true!” let me make a few important points: The free service remains unchanged. The free service will have 100% of the functionality of the contractual service. The free service will continue to have generous usage limits (currently 40,000 transactions per day and increasing regularly). The free service is still available for commercial and non-commercial use. Period. No ifs ands or buts. The contractual service will provide an SLA – and more importantly the confidence to bet your business on Calais.

We’re incredibly excited about the level of attention Calais has received. Besides blog postings and articles in the Economist – over 3,000 developers have signed up to use the Calais service. The fact that 3,000 people are willing to spend time to develop innovative applications that have the potential to impact hundreds of thousands (can we say millions?) of end users is extraordinary. That its happened in a little under 90 days is amazing.

So, in summary. We’re serious. We’re here to stay. The capabilities and tools delivered by Calais will continue to grow every single month. We have some amazingly exciting stuff in the pipeline we can’t talk about yet. And, I’ll echo your suggestion – jump in and start experimenting. There’s some great stuff to be built.

Regards,

Tom