Peter Sklar
Peter Sklar, creator and publisher of Edhat, passed away December 9, 2012 after a fifteen-month struggle with cancer.
Peter was born March 7, 1962 in Palo Alto, California. He attended Cubberley High School in Palo Alto and the Menlo School in Menlo Park.
After high school he attended Cornell University, and graduated from UC San Diego with a degree in Applied Mathematics. While at UCSD, he developed a lifelong love of horses – the ones who had numbers on their backs and ran around the racetrack at Del Mar. He began work on a probability-based handicapping system for determining horseracing outcomes.
Peter loved to ski, so after college, decided to set out on a journey to ski every mountain in the US. He made it as far as Lake Tahoe, where he met Sue Foley, his future wife. For a time they lived in Truckee, California where the two founded the Truckee Software Company, and created one of the first point of sale inventory control systems.
Peter and Sue married in 1987 and moved to Santa Barbara in 1988. In 1990, he received a Masters in Applied Statistics from UC Santa Barbara, and taught Statistics at SBCC for several years.
Peter saw things in a unique way, and as a result was often ahead of the curve in terms of innovation. He was a true visionary who perceived problems that others didn’t, and elegant solutions that seemed obvious once he voiced them. He was motivated and entrepreneurial, creating countless implementations of his many ideas.
In the early nineties, Peter became intrigued by the potential of the Internet and started coolmaps.com, among the first of the “dot com” companies. Coolmaps produced software tools for web designers. Peter realized the value of enabling these designers from all over the world to communicate and share information with one another, and developed the Coolmaps Components Club. This proved to be the idea that later manifested itself in Edhat, an online community to mirror the real community of Santa Barbara.
In the late nineties, Peter created DataDrill, a company that patented a unique method of database search. This technology was later used by Microsoft in theirs Windows software.
In 2003, he started Edhat.com. It was his dream of drawing the community together in a very unique way.
Peter loved Santa Barbara. He was an avid runner, skier and backpacker. He ran five marathons, including Boston. He was a loving husband and a loving father to his two sons.
He is survived by his wife Sue Foley, their sons Nick and Zack Sklar, his brother Michael Sklar and his family, his mother-in-law Lucy Foley, and countless friends.
Peter, you left us too soon. We will miss you more than you know, and we will always love you.