Open Cola

Opencola is a Toronto-based company that makes collaboration software.

Opencola is also a desktop application by that same company, which enables users to search, acquire, manage and share information from multiple data sources, including the Internet, peers on the Opencola network, and existing proprietary databases, from a single interface.

Opencola extends search engine capabilities with the ability to perform contextual searching – a process that searches an entire document’s contextual subject matter for relevance and tries to replenish previous searches with more relevant results.

Additional Resources

• Opencola Ltd. web site (http://www.opencola.com/)

Opencola is also a brand of cola unique in that the instructions for making it are freely available and modifiable. Anybody can make the drink, and anyone can modify and improve on the recipe as long as they, too, release their recipe into the public domain.

Although originally intended as a promotional tool to explain open source software, the drink has taken on a life of its own - so far 150,000 cans have been sold. The Toronto-based Opencola company has become better known for the drink than the software it was supposed to promote. Laird Brown, the company's senior strategist, attributes its success to a widespread mistrust of big corporations and the "proprietary nature of almost everything". The company's marketing strategy has since taken a different turn and they no longer promote the soft drink on their web page.

Read further

• Opencola soft drink (http://www.colawp.com/colas/400/cola467_recipe)