The authors would like to extend their thanks to the following individuals, groups, and inanimate objects.

Ram Venkatesh:

• Damon Larson and Laura Esterman at Apress for their patience and suggestions
• Mick Badran for his insight in technical reviewing and guidance
• Abhishek Agarwal and Anush Kumar from S3 Edge for their feedback and support
• Bala Sriram at Microsoft for encouraging me and my family
• Ritu and Tara for putting up with me while I worked on the book

Mark Simms:

• My amazing wife, Jackie, for letting me disappear for days at a time to work on this book, and for always being supportive
• My parents, Marie and Bruce, for showing me how to become a reasonably useful member of society—it couldn’t have been easy
• Steve Taylor, Colin Power, and the rest of the Cathexis crew—for sharing my belief in the Microsoft platform, and helping out with hardware for the book (the one, the only, IDBlue)
• Paul Sanford, for introducing the three amigos
• Krishnan Gopalan, Bindu Thota, and the rest of the BizTalk RFID development team at Microsoft for building such an excellent platform, and for listening to all of our complaints
• Norberto Garcia, John Wyss, and the rest of the Customer Experience team at Microsoft for giving me the opportunity to help improve the product with an excellent group
• Mick Badran, for being a great reviewer, and teaching us things about the product we didn’t know
• The humble coffee bean, for fueling this endeavor
• Our editors, for making our words shine
• For all of the excellent hardware developers that bring RFID to life—Valentina Shkolnikov, Lynn Seilo, and the rest of the Alien Technologies crew, Matt Eschbach, Prashant and PV from Motorola, and Dan Bowman from Impinj

Mark Beckner:

• Umm . . . is there anyone left to thank after all of that?!