Microsoft stops to smell the roses, creates the Shazam of flowers

Is there any synergy with telemetry?

Will they be able to monetize the data on the flower lovers?

There's precedent

I've already used a few apps to identify flowers in my garden, maybe not good I'm not sure, but it's not completely out-of-the-blue as apps go, always had good results with them (especially when you sprinkle boxes-o-beefriendly-wildflower seeds and want to now what some particular nice ones are)

This isn't going to work that well (other than as a first pass) as many flowers are very similar, and a large number of plants require you to look at more than the flower to separate them.

Portable DNA sequencing is the future, and it will probably reveal all sorts of interesting data about plant sub-species and population relationships.

You can already mow a meadow, whizz up the cuttings, and identify all the plants from the juice. Great Crested Newt surveys can already be done by taking a water sample and sending it off to check for environmental newt DNA instead of (much more expensive) trapping and night-time searches.

It surely won't be that long before your smartphone (or a similar sized machine) will able to do sequencing in the field.

No need for this, my mum has a smartphone (and has some idea of how to use it!), so I just text her a picture, and within hours I get a reply telling me what kind of plant it is, how to grow it, and gossip about the latest precocious thing my niece said.

"parents can appear infallible to their kids,"

The problem with botany in the home is that flowers may have a universal Latin classification - but will be known by different local names. That was a good reason for scientific classification in the first place.

The binomial name "Bellis perennis" is the common daisy known by several local names even in English. A database would need to cover all a plant's name variants by country or even locality.