Leah Culver

Grove, a new hosted IRC chat service for teams, launches today. It's IRC without the fuss, providing hosting, account management, access controls and fully searchable chat logging, as well as a sparkling new Web chat client.

All the great IRC client apps are supported, of course, but Grove takes care of the fiddly parts of setting up and hosting. All that's left for teams to do is sign up and start using it. Starting today they can do so for free at Grove.io.

Grove is the latest effort from Leah Culver, CEO and co-founder of Convore, and Convore developer/designer Jori Lallo. Culver was a co-founder and lead developer of Pownce, which was an early challenger to the Twitter way of communicating that also allowed attachments and events. Pownce was acquired by SixApart in 2008, and the service itself was shut down.

This young woman can't even code. She has the most stupid ideas. And she always managed to raise funds, how so?
This new project is another huge fail. You can't tell what it is by reading the description. It's IRC but not IRC, you can (or can't) use an IRC client but you need to sign up somewhere. IRC with some autologging? We had that in 1993. And the announcement of this shit is on top of HN, progit and 4chan's /prog/. Dear...