Here’s what we’re reading online, this week at Involution, on design, tech, and the digital life, in our links round up.

If You Make Sure You're Kinected, the Xbox is on the Wall
Last week, Microsoft's Kinect turned one year old, and the Redmond giant celebrated the "Kinect Effect" with a video highlighting future applications of the technology from healthcare to music to education.

Last month Marc Andreessen published a significant essay in the Wall Street Journal, outlining the many ways in which software has become not just important to our world, but the critical guts and infrastructure of it. Andreessen is, of course, pointing out a trend that has been building for some time, which has culminated in a sea change in the world of business that is only beginning to be understood. The perfect example of this change is the news that the iconic HP has chosen to abandon the PC market for software, seeing the former as commoditized and the latter as the future.

This series on technology in Africa is written by Involution friends and emerging markets experts Niti Bhan and Muchiri Nyaggah.

This week's much-ballyhoed launch of RockMelt is again getting the tech intelligentsia in a lather about a potential new browser. What they seem to be ignoring is that the battle has already been won and lost: the best case scenario for RockMelt is, romantically, they become a plucky cult favourite like Flock before running out of steam and sinking into obscurity; pragmatically, they are doing things so well and advanced that they are bought and assimilated by the companies who have already won this space.

It is with no small bit of wonder that I recently realized my participation in fantasy sports began 20 years ago, in 1991. Originally "Rotisserie Baseball", within a couple of years I was also playing fantasy football and it was not long before fantasy baseball fell off and I just enjoyed playing the football equivalent. So it was that I am realizing how little I enjoy fantasy football today, and spent a few minutes trying to figure out why. My answer? Playing fantasy football today requires little-to-no thought. It has been reduced to a near-Zynga-like game, which for my money is the ultimate condemnation. Let's take a look at the evolution of the game that has reduced it to zombie-like button-pressing.

The widely-circulated story today that Google fired an employee for reviewing the "private" files and information of users, and even harassed a user based on their "private" information might seem shocking, but it's really only illustrating something that those of us in the industry have known for years: anything we say, type or otherwise create that goes thru a pipe or a satellite or an antenna is fully accessible by every touchpoint in the process. It is kind of like being spied on by someone looking thru a peephole: we think it is private and "ours" but in reality we are buck naked for any prying eye to see.

Remember Classmates.com? Arguably the first-ever social networking website it "connected" each of us to the people we went to school with over the years. Plagued by clumsy and poorly executed "Web 1.0" thinking, and an absolutely atrocious pay-to-play business model, Classmates.com could have been Facebook. Instead, it unintentionally ushered in many thousands of social networking start-ups that, as the market shook out, have become "Facebook and everyone-else-who-doesn't-matter-much-anymore." Still, there were plenty of steps between here and there.

I don't use the moniker "IT" very often, typically only to talk about the internal stuff at my company that has to do with computing technology in the vaguest way. Under "IT" falls our hardware and software that runs the gamut of business technology: computers, phones, Internet connection, printers, other peripherals...everything. However, with the recent wave of unexpected and in many cases surprising mergers, it appears we may start talking more about giant "IT" conglomerates that seem to be in any and every technology related to computing and communication.