Microsoft sends me a periodic email (TechNet Flash Newsletter) listing the news related to their product and ecosystem that I read in a sporadic way, but a few weeks ago thanks to the Christmas holidays I had a bit of extra time and read through one containing an invite to a challenge on hackster.io.

Joining the community was quick and straightforward.
After a few days I put in an idea for the challenge pre-contest and earlier today I found out that it was selected and I should get the Genuino MKR1000 to make it a reality.

Tools are installed on my W10 phone and notebook ready to consume my week-end spare time for the next 46 days.

I believe this marketing initiative is a very smart one giving good visibility of MS tools in the IoT space to the people who should really care (developers and tinkerers) and can create the tools, applications and devices that will feed the Azure infrastructure with major volumes of data in the coming years.