I arrived in the Seattle area today to attend the BizTalk RFID Solution Days conference and hands on training, hosted by Microsoft. I was delayed in Madison due to ice for about 1.5 hours and barely made my connecting flight in Minneapolis, but everything worked out, and my baggage arrived with me.

I'm staying in downtown Bellevue at the Courtyard Marriott, which is a pretty nice hotel. It has free wired hi-speed Internet in the rooms, is there any other measure? The conference itself is about a 1/2 mile away at the Bellevue Westin. I'm just walking to avoid having to deal with parking and a rental car. I guess the weather here today and the next couple of days is unseasonably nice (sunny and a high of 50).

Bellevue seems like a city in the midst of an identity crisis. There are probably 10-15 hi-rise construction efforts underway, with signs indicating another 10-15 will be started soon. I have no doubt that if I were to return next year, I wouldn't recognize the city at all. I guess it's a good sign from the point of view of the economy. I also saw someone showing off a Lamborghini by revving it's engine and weaving in and out of Traffic. What can I say, we don't see many exotics (just our share of Honda Civic's) of those in Wisconsin.

The only other non-conference related note, was a commercial I saw for a place called Dave and Busters. It looks like an adult's version of Chuck E. Cheese, but with allot better food and better games. We defiantly need something like this in Madison, as there are some people out there who prefer to do something other then drink.

Tonight was the pre-conference reception and registration which was a good chance to hit up the vendors in a little less chaotic environment. Registration was easy and straight forward, and we got a really nice Ogio backpack (stylized with company logos). I was actually thinking about getting a small bag for my return flight, as my primary backpack with my 17" laptop was a little too unwieldy for 3 across seating on the plan.

Vendors

First vendor I talked to was Intermec, a manufacturer of RFID hardware including stationary readers, mobile readers, printers, and rugged tags. I spent most of my time talking about the Intermec IF61 (link), a new stationary reader running on top of a Linux OS. While a Linux OS is nothing new, it does come out of the box with Mono, which should allow it to run .Net Framework applications. On the hardware side, it can handle 95-264 V AC power, and has built in B/G Wifi. Intermec is releases a set of web services as part of a firmware upgrade to help with the management of the reader.

Next up was Impinj, another RFID hardware provider and tags. What I liked about them was that there reader API is based off LLRP, and open source project focused on RFID applications. Impinj's implementation of BizTalk DSPI wraps the LLRP (low level reader protocol) implementation. They are presenting on Monday, so I will have more about their speedway reading in tomorrow's post.

Zebra was my next stop and they had two printers on display. the first was a print and apply demo unit which had a clear side so you could see what was going on inside. The second was a standard label printer enabled with RFID. When I asked them about the printer API, they were quick to point out DSPI support, which wouldn't always work for me. Their DSPI implementation wraps the ZPL (Zebra Programming Language) so it is available if BizTalk RFID isn't.  Both printers have support for checking the RFID tag to make sure it's readable. For the standard label printer, if a tag isn't readable, it will print VOID on the tag (or anything else you configure).

Cathexis is one of two companies with a drawing for prizes (Guitar Hero 3 and an XBOX 360) and is based out of Canada. Signing up for the drawing incorporated RFID and some of their products, including a HF pen reader, and a long range HF antenna. The pen reader, is an RFID reader about the size of a dry erase marker and in addition to an HF  RFID reader also has blue tooth. Our name badges have an HF tag imbedded, so it is scanned by the pen reader and stored in a database. Every time you walk past their booth the long range HF antenna picks up the tag and enters you again. Needless to say, their booth is usually very busy. I think my biggest take away is an idea on how to setup a promotional give away for Terso. Don't get me wrong the Bluetooth pen reader is pretty cool just not very applicable in my current situation.