The term "Open Source Intelligence" comes from the concept of using public (open) sources to gather information instead of clandestine sources. While it's common for governments and large companies to do this, small companies usually don't. It can be a time-consuming process and therefore not a good fit for a small company... unless you find a small set of highly accurate and relatively complete sources.

In the last 12 months, I've been working with a number of customers - and within CaseySoftware itself - on strategy, product planning, and related aspects. Each of these things requires knowing the state of the market, what's going on in a specific segment, and even knowing details about certain companies. Some of this information is publicly available via product roadmaps, press releases, and even the occassional website but all of this information is highly filtered and scrubbed by PR-types, lawyers, etc.