[un]

Another application is in mobile phones that recognize objects, already being done in japan for certain objects in stores. There was also an application developed for the android platform that did some type of recognization of outdoor environments.

[lacker]

Sounds pretty cool. So why don't you make a mobile phone app that recognizes some sort of useful object to recognize? That doesn't sound like it's too big of a project for a startup.

Even if a large company was to throw a huge amount of resources at this, they would still probably have a team of a few people make a demo first. They go through the same process as a startup in a sense, first having a few people trial and demo and if it seems good then give them more money and/or engineers.

[un]

My point is about the "democratization" of classifer creation. I personally am not a programmer and don't have the talent to create a startup, and there are millions more people like me. However, if there were a place where i could feed some data and have a classifier hosted somewhere I could participate in this.

It's the same way blogs allowed many more people to start creating content on the web, whereas previously it required creating and hosting a website. Or how google app engine, might increase the creeation of web applications because previously a lot of people didn't have knowledge of administering and scaling unix/dbms based applications.

A large company would seriously have a look at roi, whereas many small entrepreneurs just have a go at it. Britannica (large company) is smaller than wikipedia (community of individuals), which is again smaller than the content on the web at large (community of incentivized small entrepreneurs).