

FlowerChecker: tell me what this plant is - nkurz
http://blog.flowerchecker.com/post/116216878053/flowerchecker-tell-me-what-is-this-plant

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Sealy
I love the idea of this. I have a casual interest in gardening and often come
across plants I'd love to know the name of.

I hope you go on to great success. Finding niches like this to run a start-up
is awesome.

In response to the other comments, perhaps you can make the botanists a
'knowledge marketplace' whereby they are paid (a micropayment of sorts) for
sitting through and identifying flowers from pictures. You can set
localisation filters so that avid gardeners can get involved too.

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pvaldes
As a people that does exactly that since a lot of years just for fun, to be
paid for continue identifying plants of the world will be a interesting
change, but be aware that they will need to compete with unpaid positions
right now. Their main problem will be to make people want to pay for something
that they have for free (in an amateur base). Helpmefind for example is still
trying to make money with this type of business.

~~~
Sealy
I agree, its hard to monetise something which people do for free and for fun
however as someone who considers themselves to be a casual gardener, just
remember the audience you are trying to reach is not the hobbyist... its the
mainstream masses.

I'm sure some VCs will love this idea. Find the right ones that don't push you
to monetise right away. Focus on user acquisition, then monetisation will come
later.

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madaxe_again
This is great, as I find myself far too often squinting at some green thing
and wondering WTF it is, BUT....

Having botanists do this is good for accuracy, horrible for scalability. A
neater solution would be to, as the botanists identify species, fill in a
number of key datum for them, e.g.

Where is it growing?

What colour are the flowers?

How many nodes do the leaves have?

Are the leaves serrated?

Is this plant parasitic?

etc.

Ask enough appropriate questions and you can identify the vast majority of
cases - essentially "animal, mineral or vegetable" \- thus freeing up the
botanists to do the really tricky ones.

~~~
pvaldes
Please take in mind that this will be really hard for neophytes. Botanical
terms are serial killers even for experts, and some families are a real
nightmare. You'll probably lost the 95% of the people in the first 10 serious
questions.

You'll need to put thousands (maybe even hundreds) of questions for some
species.

~~~
gus_massa
> _Are the leaves serrated?_

You can put this with nice image/grapics of serrated/non-serrated leaves. This
idea remind me of Akinator, where you can answer Yes, Proabbly, Don'tKnow,
ProbablyNot, No. ([http://en.akinator.com/](http://en.akinator.com/) ) (You
also have to consider the possibility of a mistake in one of the answers.)

One problem is that plants have different names in different parts of the
word, or even in different parts of the same country. Another problem is that
the same name may describe different plants in different places. (Perhaps the
Wikipedia article can be the "official" identifier.)

~~~
pvaldes
Well, in botany is more a question of: _" are the leaves entire, serrulate,
serrate, double serrate, dentate, crenulate, crenate, toothed, spiny or
undulated?"_. A lot of people just will walk away when things go a little
hard, probably feeling cheated. The problem is that people are just lazy.

I can probably identify thousands of genus plants at least at first sight but
is not easy and sometimes is impossible. There are about 3000 spurge species
for example (and maybe ten real specialists in the genus Euphorbia in the
entire world).

There are also some legal troubles in the field to care for. Some typical
recurrent doubts in plant identification in my experience are:

 _1- "How can I cultivate peyote/cannabis/some ilegal drug in my house?, Is
this a male or female plant? Is this cactus in my public park a San Pedro?"_

 _2- "Is this leaf/mushrom/berry that I'm cooking edible or poisonous?
(typically with a blurry small photo of some green poor thing that falls
between a child in cucumber disguise and an alligator)._"

Both 1 and 2 situations could easily escalate to a lawsuit against you. Assure
you to put a big disclaimer note in the terms of use.

 _3- "Urgent!, Urgent!, I want you to do my schoolwork. Identify my entire
herbarium, Is for yesterday!."_

This guy will not even remember to thank you later most of the times, nor will
consider to paid a cent for this (I will gladly charge him for my time if I
could otherwise).

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jklein11
This reminds me of this xkcd comic
[http://xkcd.com/1425/](http://xkcd.com/1425/)

~~~
sweezyjeezy
We've all but nailed the image recognition problem now though.

~~~
grkvlt
Suddenly, a leopard print sofa appears, though... [1][2]

    
    
        [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9749660
        [2] http://rocknrollnerd.github.io/ml/2015/05/27/leopard-sofa.html

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shanecleveland
Inspires a lot of ideas: Pest Identification - take a picture of an insect
infesting your house, have it identified, get a result and maybe a
recommendation, serve up pest control businesses in your area (pay a premium
to be listed).

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Someone
Computer vision variations on this:
[http://leafsnap.com/](http://leafsnap.com/) and
[https://itunes.apple.com/en/app/dogsnap/id532468586](https://itunes.apple.com/en/app/dogsnap/id532468586)
(funny at parties: what kind of of dog are your friends?)

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troncheadle
I've had a similar project I've wanted to get started on for a while now.

Does anyone know of a good API or Database for plant identification? Something
where you can provide leaf # and shape, flower type and color, location,
etc... and be returned a list of likely plants would be ideal but a database
with that information is definitely workable.

~~~
pvaldes
I like databases, and can do things really awesome, but the problem with your
focus is that databases do difficult things easier but easy things almost
impossible. I'm very confident that I would beat any newbie with a database in
most of the cases, even when the plant is totally unknown to me.

I have created a lot of databases to identify some types of organisms of my
interest and often find dificult to achieve good identifications only with
databases alone.

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avera
I also want to build my projects and get money but I'm not sure I want what I
call "dependencies" \- employees, investors. Probably I can off-load this task
to a few closest partners.

As a simple human I can fulfill all my desires and it doesn't cost millions.

Creative journey for me is more important than business race.

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estefan
I was wondering whether something like this existed for fish. Anyone know?

~~~
pvaldes
Is quicker to ask a human but you can also use fishbase. What fish do you want
to identify?

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ilovefood
man! this is slick!! I love it!!

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arthurcolle
I was recently thinking it would be sweet if a real-life PokeDex existed and
you could identify animals by putting up a phone in front of one and have it
be identified.

~~~
ashura
Hey Arthur, check out [http://zoology-app.com/](http://zoology-app.com/). This
is a real life pokedex app currently in the works

~~~
notfoss
Any ETA? I would love to try it on birds. It's a real pain searching for the
name of a newly seen bird.

Edit: Aah bummer, seems won't be available for android anytime soon.

Ref: [http://zoology-app.com/where-can-i-get-zoology-2/](http://zoology-
app.com/where-can-i-get-zoology-2/)

