Tony Kobine is an application designer, consultant programmer and software entrepreneur. He founded FCMC plc, a UK software company that brought Finar, Fingroup and Staffware to market. FCMC subsequently went public on the London Stock Exchange as Staffware plc until it was delisted in 2004 for private sale. Tony left FCMC to become an independent IT consultant.

Tony's products have ranged from doing difficult things for smart people (financial modelling, group accounts consolidation, environmental remediation, tax preparation, equity trading decision support, satellite telemetry) to freeing administrative personnel from repetitive tasks (Calypso and Staffware for workflow automation).

He has a lot of experience repurposing legacy technology to do smarter things. He wishes he had invented T9 and ASP.NET but contents himself with 3tXL - Excel spreadsheets in a 3-tier architecture, Access2ASPX - Access forms turned into dynamic Web pages and the TeleVieW workbench for developing telemetry applications.

For software design, Tony uses the Microsoft front and back office development platforms to create custom applications on local area networks, corporate intranets and the Internet. He codes in Visual Basic, VB.NET, VBA, JavaScript, VBScript and SQL Server. He also programs all components of Microsoft Office — Word, Excel, Access, Outlook, PowerPoint, Visio and MapPoint.

In addition to designing, implementing and testing code, he manages end-to-end production of product collateral material such as user documentation, Help files and training courses.