One of the conversations that I fell into at Reboot11, was about the wonders of face-recognition software, particularly Polar Rose. In the conversation someone mentioned that the next big thing would be recognition of labels or characteristic packages, so you could have a picture of a Coke bottle or a Heinz ketchup bottle, and the software would recognise it as such. While I see potential economic value in such use, I would be happier to see it used on plants – in Wikimedia Commons, we have just short of a gazillion free images of plants, and most are labeled. Imagine if you had an image of an unknown plant, and Polar Rose then said “ah, that’s a Toxicodendron radicans“.