I'd be really interested in working in machine learning, so if you know an easy way to make money from it, I would be interested to learn more. You think such a classifier would be an easy sell?
It's use is already sold (rather expensively) in inspection/robot systems in factories and in automatic license plate recognition.
I imagine it would be easy to sell. Create a classifier that rates a user's attractiveness and many dating sites or individial users might interested in paying for it.
Call centers might be interested in paying for accent identification, they can route a call based on accent to a employee with similar accent.
Microsoft will release project natal later this year and probably make billions from it.
As far i can see the opportunity is absolutely huge (trillions and trillions of dollars) since it is so commercially useful (unlike the web industry which has been based around selling eyeballs).