Josh Sharfman

Chief Technology Officer, California Association of Realtors

Joshua D.J. Sharfman has worked with the California Association of REALTORS® (C.A.R.) for the last eighteen years: first as a consultant; later as an outside board member of the Association's Real Estate Business Services (REBS) subsidiary; and now as the Association's chief technical officer as well as the chief executive officer of C.A.R.'s Real Estate Business Technologies (REBT) subsidiary, charged with delivering the industry's first REALTOR®-centric, REALTOR®-owned transaction management system.

Prior to joining C.A.R. full-time, Sharfman led product development for Legal Research Network as its senior vice president of products, an organization that delivered legal compliance and education training to the Fortune 500 group of companies. From May 1996 through December 2001, he served as chief executive officer and a director of Digital Lava, a provider of innovative solutions for synchronized multimedia for training and communication applications.

From 1994 to 1996, Dr. Sharfman served as vice president of research and development at ParcPlace-Digitalk, Inc., a cross-platform object-oriented software firm. From 1993 to 1994, he operated his own software development consulting firm, focusing on software development process improvement and expert testimony for software patent and copyright infringement matters.

From 1984 to 1993, Sharfman served as executive vice president of research and development at Dassault Systemes USA, a wholly owned subsidiary of Dassault Systemes SARL, and in a variety of marketing and development management functions at CADAM Inc., both of which are CAD/CAM software vendors. From 1981 to 1984, he served as section head of the Electro-Optical and Data Systems Group at Hughes Aircraft Company. Since 1980, Sharfman also has served as an adjunct professor of engineering at the University of Southern California. Sharfman holds four system and method patents for software inventions and has many more in the pipeline at the US Patent and Trademark Office. He holds a B.S. degree in computer engineering from UCLA, an M.S. degree in engineering management from USC and a Ph.D. in business from Capella. Sharfman and his family live is Southern California.