Today, Microsoft fired a significant salvo in the war for a Unified User Experience, with the debut of its Surface tablet. Taking a page from the Apple playbook, Microsoft is creating both the hardware and software for the Surface, a strategy it once executed successfully, with the Xbox 360 gaming console; and twice not so successfully, with the Zune MP3 player and Kin smart phone going down in flames.

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

The Internet of Things Will Rise in Boston
With the advent of the mobile revolution, we're now living connected lives, where our day-to-day activities are closely tied to the digital products and services that we carry with us everywhere on our smart phones. The future vision of smart devices networked via an Internet of Things takes this connectedness one step further, to a place where not only our phones, but our cars, our homes, the appliances within them, and any number of other objects can communicate with each other and us. This connected vision may be closer to reality than we realize.

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.

Today the Droid X was released, Android's latest salvo in the smartphone wars.