ReadWriteHack

In enterprises everywhere, including even the largest ones, the transition to cloud-based architectures has brought a new class of managers into the computing process. Suddenly, personnel managers and folks whose purview had been limited to finance and personnel, are being doubled-up with oversight roles for cloud deployments. The back office is no longer in the back (or the basement), and now these new managers are wondering: What is all this we're dealing with?

Donna Burbank - who's a senior director of product marketing for CA Technologies' long-time data visualization tool, ERwin, has a new phrase for this class of customers: business sponsors. "When I talk to our customers, they tell me it's a whole new... thing, for lack of a more technical word. They've heard of SQL Server, but what is this SQL Azure thing? They don't have the skill sets, and may be nervous about that. These business sponsors might not be moving the information, but they want to see it. And they don't want to look at those database scripts. They want to look at something they can understand."

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.

It supports all the great IRC client apps, of course, but Grove takes care of the fiddly parts of setup 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.

What is the second thing that a company should do when it discovers a data breach with personal information? Call CSIdentity and arrange for its wholesale ID theft protection service. (The first, obviously, is to fix the leak and make sure it doesn't happen again.) The company announced a program called Global ID Protector earlier this month.

There are numerous SaaS-based scanning services for your Web site, and most of them will check your HTML for errors, look for security loopholes or ping your site to make sure it is operating and reachable. A not-so-new entrant into this area is from Cenzic, called ClickToSecure Cloud. Beginning today, the service is available for purchase from the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.

Two companies that you don't hear much about these days have partnered to help improve online Q&A. ChaCha and Wolfram Alpha have now combined forces to improve the quality and depth of answers to online questions.

Stuck on a Ruby on Rails problem? Call Rails Hotline, a free helpline staffed by volunteer Rails developers, at (877) 817-4190.

Rails Hotline, which was just launched this morning, is powered by Pocket Hotline, a platform designed for companies to crowdsource technical support.

Node.js sponsor company Joyent launched a Node.js job board today.

The inaugral listings include jobs from Adservice, TWAR, Voxer and Yammer.

The board is powered by SimplyHired. It costs $350 to post a job for 30 days, but as part of the launch promotion you can post jobs for $100.

Word of mouth is an incredibly powerful marketing tool, but how do you work out which customers are most important in spreading your message? Services like PeerIndex or Klout help you find experts and influencers in particular communities, but can't measure what people have actually done for your business. The new Vipli.st service from Awe.sm aims to fill this gap by uncovering the fans who drive the most sharing.

Launched at the Strata Startup Showcase last week, the site visualizes how Plancast events are shared across social networks like Twitter and Facebook. It draws a tree showing the first person to create a plan, with links below to everyone who added themselves as attendees after clicking on that link, downwards through the entire history of the conversation around the event. Here's what it looks like for a SXSW Lean Startup plan:

Have you ever been stuck circling the block waiting for a parking space to open up? The new ParkCirca space-sharing service might make that a thing of the past. Co-founder and CEO Chadwick Meyer told me how he was fruitlessly hunting for a space when he noticed how many private driveways had no cars in them. Why not let the driveway owners make some money from them, and save stress (and gas) for the drivers at the same time?

That's exactly what ParkCirca sets out to do. Driveway owners register when their space will be free and how much they want to charge. Drivers can then use an iPhone application to find available spots near their destination, and book them for the time they need. A typical charge might be $2 an hour, in which case an owner with a space available for just eight hours every week day could make up to $320 a month, without losing a place to park in the evenings or weekends.

The RailsBridge Open Workshop project, which teaches web app development to programmers and non-programmers, has announced its 2011 schedule that'll include eight more of its popular free workshops for women.

RailsBridge's workshops take place on a Friday evening and full-day Saturday, during which time participants learn how to develop a web app using the Ruby on Rails framework. Over the past year-and-a-half, the project has trained almost 600 people, nearly 500 of them women. RailsBridge hopes to expand further this year, with workshops in San Francisco, Seattle, and Chicago.