I was asked to report on emerging technologies to help people collaborate and build informed communities. The mobile space is still up for grabs, and I watched a presentation from a local Seattle startup called Trover, which is trying to take the popularity of Yelp and Foursquare (which boasts one billion checkins to date) a step further and connect people based on the location of photographs they take. Co-founder Jason Karas talked about connecting people on a level beyond frivolous cat photos, which prompted me to get on the mic and ask how his platform can help with breaking news and issues of public interest. So it turns out, they’re devising an algorithm to rank image popularity based on views/shares/etc. which in theory will allow important geo-tagged images to surface.