Picklive just announced the closing of a seed round of funding from investors, including from Last.FM backer Stefan Glaenzer. Picklive is a London based start-up that is offering a mix between the nanogaming that LiveHiveSystems is offering and the daily fantasy games you can find at places like SnapDraft.

I like Picklive’s take on creating a real-time fantasy sports game. Instead of predicting the outcome of every pitch or play, in Picklive’s system you compete against other players where each player selects three players, and teams score fantasy points according to their threesome’s performance in that ten minute window. For that ten minutes, fantasy players just have to worry about their team, not every play. For a sport like soccer where the clock rolls continuously, this affords fantasy players the opportunity to play eight or nine games within just one soccer match, or just one, if they so choose.

The site was originally called Football3s, but the site changed its name to Picklive to indicate that it thinks this model can work for more than just fantasy soccer. I can easily see inning-by-inning versions of the game available for fantasy baseball and quarterly versions for fantasy football.

In-game fantasy sports is still a growing niche, and its viability and profitability is still in question. I think Picklive’s simplicity gives it an advantage, because it does not seem like as big a commitment. You only need to pick three players and then let them play. You do not have to watch every pitch or down in order to compete. It is not as big a commitment.