System Photonics - System Photonics is a brilliant company making solar photovoltaic tiles for roof and façade integration, based on a unique ceramic substrate that looks good, is recyclable and lasts forever, yet keeping the same level of efficiency as normal "ugly" solar panels, and keeping the price reasonable. I am the international business developer for System Photonics, mainly busy with the French and USA markets right now.
JumpGen Systems - I'm one of five founders of this startup in San Diego making rugged computers for telecommunications equipment manufacturers, mainly ATCA, AMC and custom blades based on multi-core processors. JumpGen engineers are without a doubt the best computer hardware designers in the world. I am the international business developer for JumpGen, plus I made the CMS system for this site, and I take care of the site's content.
Slow Food France - the official site of the french Slow Food association, which I co-founded 10 years ago - I did the entire CMS and design, back then there were no blogs...
Catherine Marcogliese - contemporary art (photography, installations) from Catherine, my wife
Cathy Marc- western landscape paintings by Cathy Marc
StateWorks - I am involved in a startup in Switzerland making software engineering systems based on virtual finite state machines: no more programming, no more bugs! Unfortunately, 20 years ahead of their time, but someday, someday...
ioBoard.net - I am also involved in a startup in Germany making intelligent IO modules for Ethernet: digital and analog IO with event management (no need for polling) and on-board PID loops...
SyncBackSE - the most important program in my PCs. With a NAS in your network - I use a QNAP TN-219P with two 2 Terabyte discs in RAID 1 mirroring - SyncBack will backup your files incrementally, remembering what is on the disc and only backing up the files changed since last time. Brilliant. Why did I not think of that 10 years ago? For the first time, I now back up all my disk drives every week, painlessly, reliably.
Microsoft Office - Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access and Visio I use all the time. Despite the incredible amount of useless clutter in these programs, you basically cannot live without Office. Word is ok if your document is under 300 pages and does not require fancy typesetting.
Chrome - it has replaced Firefox in my PCs. And I only use IE when I have to. I wish I could get Firefox's Web Developer plugin for Chrome.
Thunderbird - best email client. Buggy and getting fatter, but way better than Outlook, which will disable your PC better and more completely than any virus if you let the Inbox get beyond a certain size (1.7G I think, I prefer to forget...).
Adobe Acrobat - the full version. Indispensable.
Adobe Creative Suite - mainly Photoshop, InDesign.
XnView - best way to view photos and do batch transformations.
Genuine Fractals - essential plugin for Photoshop, allows you to increase image size without the visible degradation that you get with Photoshop bicubic or other algorithms.
Silkypix - fabulous tool to work raw files from a camera. Does things that Photoshop cannot do. RAW files allow changing the camera settings after the picture is taken.
TurboCAD - poor man's Autocad, works beautifully and costs a little over $100.
WordPress - for blogs I used to use Movable Type, but WordPress is much cleaner and easier to use. Movable Type has too much code clutter that makes it a pain to really customize.
X-Plane - a flight simulator, the only game in my computer, except this is not a game, it is a REAL flight simulator, not an animation like Microsoft's FS; this one is FAA certifiable, but the home version is only $29 and it is BRILLIANT, so much so that I bought pedals and a yoke. You get hundreds of planes, from Cessna to F-22 to 747, and real charts plus just about every airport in the world. The automatic pilot works, as do the VORs.
EditPlus - a plain editor for coding in C or PHP or CSS or XHTML. Also a good place to cut and paste temporarily from Word or Excel, to get rid of all the Microsoft style clutter, for example when transferring an article from Word to a WordPress blog.
FileZilla - used to use WinSCP and WS_FTP, but Filezilla is less quirky and more reliable.
Putty - simple Telnet and SSH client.
WinRAR - essential compression software.
Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL - the best environment for custom web development.
TMPGEnc DVD Author - the best way to get stuff onto CD or DVD
Google - Gmail, Documents, Calendar, Contacts, Maps, Translate, I use them all.
McAfee - Antivirus Plus has been in my PCs since the early days of viruses. Never had problems. I will not switch to any other system.
Skype - depsite annoying ads, a great service. Works as well as a phone most of the time. was an early adopter.
PowWowNow - great telephone conference service with local access in most countries, no monthly fee.
Mailchimp - mailings can no longer be managed on your own server unless you spend months doiing the things you need to do to avoid getting tagged as spam. Mailchimp is easy to use and gives me 100% delivery both for commercial and not-for-profit use.
Blackberry Storm - true crap, I wish I had bought an Iphone. The Storm has only 4 very fragile buttons, if you put Storm in the pouch provided, you will break all four buttons, like I did within 1 minute of purchase. GPS does not work most of the time. Does not have WiFi. Good for getting email (not writing). Keyboard is not usable, in fact it is useless. Cannot do Skype. Camera is not bad.