Opencalais lets you submit a string (REST API) ....and it will analyze that string and break it down into named-entities, relationships, keywords, etc.
Are there better tools other than opencalais? (both free and commercial)
I presume that you have done an unsuccessful web search or you don't even know what to search exactly.
So, first I give you pertinent keywords: Information Extraction (IE) of which Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a subtask.
Indeed OpenCalais is listed in that Wiki
Additional text has been truncated due to copyright reasons. Things without URLs and private things don't get truncated.