[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).