I got EXTREMELY lucky last week and won an HP Mini 311 notebook from a Microsoft Tag Twitter contest.

I did my required tweet to enter last Tuesday, and one hour later received notification that I had won the weekly drawing.

Apparently you can tweet up to 500 times (I pity the followers of those who do that), so it was really lucky that I won, and I sympathize with those who had been really trying.

If you would like to try your luck, there are seven weekly prizes left, and you can find out about the contest here: http://tag.microsoft.com/ttcontest.aspx

For a free PC, I thought it was the least I could do to find out what Microsoft Tag is. I was vaguely aware of those pastel-y triangle-y square things that look like someone put one of Don Johnson’s Miami Vice outfits through a shredder, and knew that the company I work for (one of the world’s largest consumer products companies) was looking into putting them on our products, packaging and advertising, but didn’t know much more about the technology.

I thought they were just an improvement over bar codes, and would be used in retail store scanners, but I was mistaken. These tags are meant to be scanned by consumers using their mobile phones, to get instant access to information, websites, reviews, etc. Scanning a tag can open a web page, import a contact card, or dial a phone number, play a video…

Tag reader software can be installed on Windows Mobile, iPhone, Symbian, Blackberry, Android, J2ME, and other phones (and I suspect that it will be available for Windows Phone 7 also :).

There are built-in tracking, metrics and analysis tools, to help companies using Tag make decisions about their marketing expenditures.

(And they don’t have to look Miami Vice-y – They can be customized to reflect the personality of the person or a brand.)

Looks like interesting stuff. You can find out more at http://tag.microsoft.com.