Stéfan pointed me to the AlchemyAPI service. AlchemyAPI provides an API for extracting “information about people, places, companies, topics, languages” and concepts. They have a nice demo on the front page where they take a news a top news story, extract the entities and then create a spring-loaded graph of the named entities.
You can see that for this story the system found organizations, a city, countries and persons.
A free API key is available for up to 30,000 calls a day.