This company is founded by a bunch of ex-Plumtree (now BEA) guys. “Tap into first degree network of people and filter what’s going on in our community” – good description.

The demo is pretty damn nice looking, well done. What I like about the layout is that it doesn’t look like a calendar, there are simple heading for “what I’m doing” and “what my friends are doing” and “fuzzy” and “firm” plans. Basically it’s a really well thought through user interaction model.

I’m also struck by the overwhelming sense of how boring my social life must be if there is a requirement for a system that essentially goes through an online negotiation process for scheduling. But I’m not their target audience it’s clear, people who are much more involved in online social networks (facebook, myspace) are the target… which begs the question of they plan to integrate with these services.

“We want to embrace existing communication mechanisms, like e-mail”. Very interesting and lightweight email integration, simply cc ‘plans@skobee.com’ and it inserts into your skobee and scrapes out semantic data like date/time/where. Cool. They are planning on IM integration as well.

The audience really likes this company, as do the panel judges.

In addition to the standard “where’s RSS” question from Winer, he stated rather emphatically that he would want a default calendar view. Skobee said that they haven’t had a request for it, so Winer asked the audience who would want it, I didn’t see any hands go up. This validates what I wrote above that the layout that emphasizes “what I’m doing” and so forth is something that people will gravitate to. The company also makes a really good point that people already use calendars so they would rather have them suck the content into what they are already using.