Jim Shaffer

Jim Shaffer, co-founder of TARGUSinfo, has primarily been responsible for the technology development of the company's services. He has extensive computer knowledge in large database design, integration, maintenance, linkage, retrieval and applications. Jim and George Moore are co-inventors of 17 issued patents. These patents all relate to real-time linking and integration of information over a network.

Prior to co-founding TARGUSinfo, Jim was a co-founder of National Decision Systems (NDS) in 1979. Jim and George also developed two different generations of geo-demographic segmentation systems: Vision and MicroVision.

While at NDS, Jim also led the development of the first Laser Video Disk and, in 1983, Infomark, a multiple CD-ROM PC-based desktop marketing system. Infomark stored on CD-ROM 30-plus unrelated geographic, cartographic, demographic, list, panel consumption and spatial databases in a LZW compressed form. Data could be instantly retrieved, decompressed and integrated directly from the CDs for any combination of databases, for an area of any size or shape anywhere in the United States. The retrieved and processed data could be displayed in formatted reports, graphs, mapped and/or imported in to third party software packages.

Jim received a BA in Physical Chemistry from the University of California at Santa Barbara and an MBA from San Diego State University.