I know an academic who always told me she was very well connected to Microsoft and the tech companies, now she emailed me Tuesday saying she was doing a study with Microsoft sponsored also by Acer on how people who live in another country and use web 2.0 tools not in the countries language, i.e a Welshman, working and writing in English living in the Netherlands.
The study was about blogging social bookmarking tagging, IM ing etc and as a reward for doing the 12 month project you get a free PC (you can keep) running Vista, a 250G external USB hard drive and Norton Save & Restore, all they do is install some software which monitors all my Internet habits and uploads that to them every day.
So I rang her and said your going to give me a new PC etc for just doing what I already do - Yes she said, fine I'm in, I said.
So 1 day later the PC arrived (can you believe that- shipped from Acer Switzerland) and now I'm playing on it with Vista etc.
Now a Mac mate of mine said ah it's only eye candy, but so are Macs I said, but so far it seems cool fast and without any problems.
I'll be realy interested to see my year end results (we will get a personalised anaylysis, and a copy of the overall anaylysis of all 1000 people on the study (anonymised)
Now this seems a free lunch to me but let's see.
