plaYce which showcased at last year’s Techcrunch50 is today announcing the beta launch of its Game-Platform-as-a-Service, aimed at assisting game developers bring high-quality 3D game play right into the browser. Games in plaYce are based on 3D renderings of real cities such as San Francisco and New York.

Casual games on the Web are quite bland when compared to “Tripple-A Games”—high budget titles typically produced by game studios such as EA. The type of games developed and/or distributed by the likes of Zynga, SGN, Kongregate or Oberon just don’t cut it for “real” gamers which are used to superior high-quality game play and graphics.

plaYce tackles this matter by allowing high-quality games to be streamed into the browser. The company claims it delivers quick-engagement by initiating play within a minute for games ranging from 300MB up to a few gigabytes in size. Granted, that is indeed quite a bit of time to wait for a game to load, however, the game quality is in a different league than the quality of current casual games (see the video embedded at the end of the post). Users are required to install a 7.7MB plug-in (the “plaYce player”) in order to play games utilizing plaYce’s technology. IE & Firefox are supported on PCs, with Linux and Mac coming soon I’m told.

plaYce is targeting independent game developers who will be able to port existing games or build new ones from scratch. The company’s Game-Platform-as-a-Service includes:

• Game Streaming – Where the user’s current and predicted point of view in the game define what piece of data needs to be upload to the client.
• Graphics Engine – In-browser complex rendering including soft shadows, shaders, lights, particle effects, etc.
• Game Arenas - Currently San Francisco, Manhattan and a few large open terrain areas, with two major European cities and Hong Kong on the way. Game developers can also model 3D arenas in any standard 3D modeling tool and then import it. Game arenas that “float in space” are also supported.
• Facebook & OpenSocial Integration – Allows users to import friends into games.
• Micro transaction & Virtual Goods – Game developers will be able to implement these in any game.
• In-game advertising – Provided through Massive and Double Fusion.
• Services – Game lobby, security, asset management, quality of service.

Like any technology there are “performance envelops”… Game developers will have to be aware that the scenes are streamed and that there are hardware considerations (CPU, graphics card, etc.). Developers should also be aware that the plaYce API is written in C++, with the next version supporting Lua.

The company’s business model will be based on micro-transactions, virtual goods, in-game ads, and rev-share with game developers. Developers will not be charged for the use of the platform.

plaYce is showcasing its technology with Downtown Defender, a game it developed itself (it does not plan to enter the game production business). The company describes the game as:

Downtown Defender brings the game mechanics of “Desktop Tower Defense” and the emotion of a realistic, giant monster movie into a tight, high impact experience. Using a Black Hawk Military helicopter, players will defend San Francisco from waves of massive creatures by dropping powerful gun turrets into strategic positions. Players will also need to rescue people on the ground from being eaten alive. The more people the player collects, the greater man power they will have for their turrets.

This post was originally posted on TechCrunch.com where I cover the Israeli startup scene.

Many professionals I know are not project managers by profession and yet most at some point or another have had the dubious pleasure of battling it out with a project management (PM) application—MS Project typically the nightmare of choice. It begins with lofty ideals of planning and running an organized project (for once). Yet what usually happens is that they end-up managing the project management tool, rather than have it manage the project. Granted, PM tools have made progress in recent years, with Basecamp from 37Signals leading the charge with a Web-based subscription model that sports a user-friendly interface. The fact remains though that there’s a long way to go before non-project managers can put a hand on their heart and claim that the benefits of using a PM tool outweigh its overhead.This was that I had in mind when Israeli startup Clarizen approached me, explaining theirs is a project management and collaboration tool specifically aimed at non-project managers. There’s no question Clarizen is a latecomer to the space, but they seem to have the right ingredients: A fairly convenient interface, a smidgen of unique differentiation, and friendly pricing to boot—and $15M in funding doesn’t hurt either, of course.

Clarizen is making two great offers available for TechCrunch readers:  First, Clarizen is auctioning off five (5) FREE one year subscriptions to TechCrunch readers. All you need to do is explain in the comments why you need and want Clarizen and how you intend to use it. The Clarizen team will select the 5 winners. Make sure to include a valid email address along with your comment!  Second, anyone who mentions this TechCrunch post to Clarizen’s sales team when making any purchase will receive one additional free subscription for the term of their purchase.

Clarizen was designed as a PM tool for operational/functional managers (think: department heads). This is a good move because the biggest failing point in project management is probably during the set-up stage which requires the project be planned out to the “T” before it can be rolled out. This is a process that requires a high level of familiarity with such methodologies, so it’s no surprise why non-professional project managers bail on it so often.

Clarizen deals with this basic problem by allowing the project participants to assist in the planning, even if the project has already begun. The collaborative planning and execution can transpire among teams working within the same organization, or among those whose resources are dispersed between two or more companies.

Here’s an example: Let’s say my project is the creation of a Facebook app and I own entire the project. I can delegate my R&D manager to set and manage the in-house development process and its dependencies. When it comes to the user interface, though, I’ve gone with an outside contractor who obviously has his own work processes and dependencies. With Clarizen I can have the contractor enter and update all the relevant info independently, while I maintain a unified view of the project at large. As a side note, Clarizen includes with each company subscription a single free license for a partner.

One of the things I like about Clarizen is that it puts reality above methodology. Even if the full scope is unknown or the whole plan is not complete, projects can be kicked-off by activating only the parts that are ready to roll. At any point, any portion of the project can be switched back to draft mode, be paused, re-planned and reactivated. So if the graphics designer goes snowboarding for a week unexpectedly (something far too many of us can relate to), no problem, the task can be reactivated when he/she gets back. Other PM tools provide similar functionality but in a version control paradigm that involves the project’s “baseline”. Basically this creates a new version of the project each time an “anomaly” (i.e., delays caused by the real world) occur.  Clarizen, in contrast, treats delays as a normal occurrence.

Another feature I found useful is that Clarizen allows projects to be updated without having to log into the application. Using the Facebook app example above, the contractor would be sent an email notification (screenshot below) with a link to a form in which the task statuses can be updated. No login is required, no subscription has to be purchased. Very convenient indeed.

Clarizen has been selling its solution for a year now with the bulk of its customer base considering it an alternative to heavy-duty enterprise solutions such as Clarity and Primavera. The company did not reveal the amount of actual subscribers it has, but did share with me that it has over 200 customers and that current contract closures are predominantly for 12-month terms.

This post was originally posted on TechCrunch.com where I cover the Israeli startup scene.

ClickTale is revving-up for its second round of financing by both rolling out a new email tracking feature and reporting that it’s making significant headway on the business front: Passing the 20K registered customer mark and a 500% revenue growth in the past 12 months. With more than 550 customers paying $99 to $290 a month, we estimate the company is pulling in somewhere between $55,000 and $100,000 a month.

For those of you unfamiliar with the company, here’s a short primer on ClickTale’s in-page web analytics: Requiring site owners to paste a bit of JavaScipt into pages, ClickTale is then able to capture a variety of user-centric data such as mouse movements, scrolls, clicks, and keystrokes. The data is used to provide a view of how users actually interact with websites by way of videos of users’ browsing sessions, and through aggregated reports—form analytics, heatmaps, etc.

Another interesting upside of using ClickTale is that it provides a real measurement of user engagement. This is because it’s able to truly determine the amount of time that users were moving their mouse, scrolling, typing, or clicking. Certainly “Time on Page” provided by standard web analytic solutions will suffice for many, but there are definitely site owners who can use such valuable data to optimize pages and their elements.

ClickTale’s new email tracking feature is an extension of its core service. Using special tags added to links within emails, ClickTale is able to generate video and data on each individual user that clicked a link and consequently interacted with the linked website. The video embedded below shows my own personal interaction with ClickTale’s website after Tal Schwartz (CEO), emailed me about this feature.

You can start using ClickTale for free, but be warned, you may end up paying for a web service that actually delivers real, quantifiable value.