My name’s Seth Priebatsch. I’m the chief ninja of SCVNGR. I am a proud Princeton dropout. Also proud to have relocated here to Boston, where I actually grew up. Yeah, Boston. Easy wins. I should just go and name the counties that we’ve got around here. So, I’m also fairly determined to try and build a game layer on top of the world. And this is sort of a new concept, and it’s really important. Because while the last decade was the decade of social and the decade of where the framework in which we connect with other people was built, this next decade will be the decade where the game framework is built, where the motivations that we use to actually influence behavior, and the framework in which that is constructed, is decided upon, and that’s really important. 

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So I want to talk today about an idea. It’s a big idea. Actually, I think it’ll eventually be seen as probably the single biggest idea that’s emerged in the past century. It’s the idea of computation. Now, of course, that idea has brought us all of the computer technology we have today and so on. But there’s actually a lot more to computation than that. It’s really a very deep, very powerful, very fundamental idea, whose effects we’ve only just begun to see.

Well, I myself have spent the past 30 years of my life working on three large projects that really try to take the idea of computation seriously. So I started off at a young age as a physicist using computers as tools. Then, I started sort of drilling down, thinking about the computations I might want to do, trying to figure out what primitives they could be built up from and how they could be automated as much as possible. Eventually, I created a whole structure based on symbolic programming and so on that let me build Mathematica. And for the past 23 years, at an increasing rate, we’ve been pouring more and more ideas and capabilities and so on into Mathematica, and I’m happy to say that’s led to many good things in R and D and education, lots of other areas. Well, I have to admit, actually, that I also had a very selfish reason for building Mathematica. I wanted to use it myself, a bit like Galileo got to use his telescope 400 years ago. But I wanted to look, not at the astronomical universe, but at the computational universe.

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Argentina has been celebrating 200th anniversary of the beginning of the process of emancipation from Spain, which started back on May 25, 1810. At the time, a local committee decided to remove the Spanish viceroy and to begin the process of creating and independent government. As part of the celebrations, between May 21-25, there will be multiple activities, stands from the different Argentinean Provinces, shows, and the reopening of the Colón Theater. Hundreds of thousands of people are participating of the activities, which will take place until next Tuesday where people will gather at 9 de Julio Avenue near the Obelisk in the capital, Buenos Aires.

To cover the festivities using online tools, a group of bloggers created the site Tu Bicentenario [es] (Your Bicentennial), where they combine different web services to create real-time coverage, with the hashtag #bicentenarioarg [es]. In this short interview, Vanina Berghella [es], Nicolás Piccoli, and Alvaro Liuzzi [es] spoke about the project’s goals.

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