Gadgetwise Blog: A Crowd Service Gives Tips on Cloud Service

If you are looking for a cloud service, 50,000 friends would like to help you out.

The Web site Fixya, best described as a volunteer technical assistance forum, assessed more than 50,000 support requests to find the most common problems with five cloud services. Roughly 40,000 were about Apple’s iCloud; the rest were nearly evenly distributed among the others.

Among Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, SugarSync and Box, each had some technical difficulties, but the one that received the most positive feedback from Fixya users is the lesser known SugarSync.

And good news for users: While SugarSync was already was considered easy to use by the Fixya community, SugarSync has recently been redesigned to be simpler still.

There is one large fly in the SugarSync ointment. It won’t work with QuickBooks, a problem that was the top query for SugarSync.

Dropbox was cited by 40 percent of its audience for security concerns, followed by 25 percent for storage limits and 15 percent for syncing issues.

Google Drive drew 30 percent of its questions about missing folders, followed by 20 percent for syncing issues.

After upgrading to Apple’s Mountain Lion operating system, 35 percent of iCloud users sought answers about syncing between Apple devices, while 25 percent had problems syncing with non-Apple devices.

Box users required help with uploading 25 percent of the time, cited security issues 25 percent of the time and asked about backup failures 20 percent of the time.

The entire report with solutions for the most common problems of each service can be found on FixYa’s blog.

The Haggler: Radio Shack and the Power of the Crowd

Trying an end-around, the Haggler posted a direct request in the column to Dorvin Lively, the company’s interim C.E.O., asking him to get in touch. To ensure that Mr. Lively got the message, the Haggler included the company’s media relations e-mail address and urged readers to send notes, too.

Well, many did. Exactly how many is unclear, as the Haggler is guessing that the 200 people who copied him in e-mails to Radio Shack is some fraction of the total. Suffice to say, it was a deluge, and it started about three minutes after the column was posted on Saturday night, gained momentum on Sunday and Monday and continued, in tapered-off numbers, for days.

It was an outpouring that gave the Haggler the kind of brief head rush that must be commonplace for megalomaniacs. Fear the Haggler, all ye recalcitrant corporations! For the Haggler Hordes stand ready at their keyboards and, given the signal, they shall unleash a torrent of highly articulate and deeply empathic missives that ye do not want clogging up thine Internet server.

“If I were you, Radio Shack, I’d respond to the Haggler P.D.Q.,” wrote Deborah Lopez, capturing the tone of a typical letter. “In the meantime, I think I’ll keep walking past your store and not stop in. Good luck.”

“If you won’t even respond to The New York Times’s Haggler,” Len Coris asked, “why should I think you would respond to me about a problem or an issue?”

“Bad Radio Shack,” wrote another reader, addressing the company as if it were a wayward Chihuahua. “Bad!”

Needless to say, this pig pile of indignity put Radio Shack in a far chattier mood. A spokeswoman, Kally Masino, wrote the Haggler at 10:08 a.m. on the Sunday that the column was published. Then she wrote again about 20 minutes later. She didn’t actually say “uncle,” but it was sort of implied.

First, though, let’s back up and explain why the Haggler contacted Radio Shack in the first place. It started with a letter from Ronnie Hirsh of Manhattan. He had tried to pre-order an iPhone 5 from his local Radio Shack, and was told that he’d have it by Sept. 21 if he bought a $50 gift card. Well, because of a delivery glitch, it didn’t arrive by then. And, it turned out, that gift card was nonrefundable.

“Radio Shack figured out how to make money without actually selling a phone,” he wrote. “In my opinion, sleazy.”

When the Haggler wrote to Radio Shack, an unnamed person in the media relations department replied, saying the pre-order agreement made clear that gift cards were nonrefundable. This unnamed person also noted (as did Mr. Hirsh, in his original letter) that people who complained loudly enough were, in fact, given refunds. Mr. Hirsh, with his returned $50 in hand, bought his iPhone elsewhere.

The Haggler thinks that if a company makes it plain that a fee or service or a fill-in-the-blank is nonrefundable — which was the case here — it’s up to the consumer to read and understand that fact. Given that Radio Shack refunded Mr. Hirsh’s money despite clearly saying it was not obliged to — well, put this one in the win column for Radio Shack.

So, if this matter was resolved, why did the Haggler invite readers to carpet e-mail Radio Shack?

Well, whoever was interacting with the Haggler stopped doing so after he asked about another matter, soon after the gift-card issue was hashed over. A few months ago, the Haggler returned an item to Radio Shack for which he’d paid cash. At the register, a cashier asked for the Haggler’s phone number. Why would you need a phone number, the Haggler asked.

“The system” requires a phone number, the clerk explained.

Ah, the system. The Haggler managed to get his money back without divulging his phone number, but an online search suggested that others haven’t been as lucky. It was when the Haggler asked about this strange policy that Radio Shack went silent.

Fast-forward to that e-mail from Ms. Masino, the P.R. rep. Reached by phone a few days after her Sunday e-mail, she said she’d been the person corresponding with the Haggler. When asked why she had suddenly ceased all communication, she said she didn’t know. The Haggler asked her to take a guess. Well, she might have handed off the Haggler’s message to someone else on the P.R. team, she said, who might have assumed she’d already dealt with the matter. Or not. At one point, she used the word “dumbfounded,” though it’s not clear what she was dumbfounded about.

The conversation dumbfounded the Haggler.

Later, Ms. Masino e-mailed: “It’s become clear that we didn’t handle your questions as well as you should expect from a national retailer. We owe you an apology because one failed response has distracted from a broader discussion about taking care of customers.”

Apology accepted. Now, what’s with this phone-number demand for cash transactions? “We collect name, address and phone contacts for refunds,” she wrote, “even for small cash purchases, because it creates an audit trail that can be used to make certain each refund is delivered to a specific person and is not a fraudulent event.”

This makes sense only once you realize that the fraudulent events that worry Radio Shack, as Ms. Masino confirmed, are those that might be committed by employees, who could hand over cash they should not be handing over. Many retailers have an identical policy, she added. But the Haggler has encountered it only at Radio Shack. Regardless, the company’s suspicions about its staff members don’t seem a compelling reason to force customers to share personal information. Radio Shack needs either a better system or more employees that it trusts.

E-mail: haggler@nytimes.com. Keep it brief and family-friendly, include your hometown and go easy on the caps-lock key. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.

Digital Domain: Flightfox Lets the Crowd Find the Best Airfares

Travelers with complex travel plans may have noticed, however, that the search results aren’t necessarily consistent. This has created a business opportunity for Flightfox, a start-up company based in Mountain View, Calif., which uses a contest format to come up with the best fare that the crowd — all Flightfox-approved users — can find.

A traveler goes to Flightfox.com and sets up a competition, supplying information about the desired itinerary and clarifying a few preferences, like a willingness to “fly on any airline to save money” or a tolerance of “long layovers to save money.” Once Flightfox posts the contest, the crowd is invited to go to work and submit fares.

The contest runs three days, and the winner, the person who finds the lowest fare, gets 75 percent of the finder’s fee that the traveler pays Flightfox when setting up the competition. Flightfox says fees depend on the complexity of the itinerary; many current contests have fees in the $34-to-$59 range.

Travelers’ savings can be considerable. In a contest for a long, complex trip that began in Sydney, passed through Barcelona and then many South American destinations before returning to Sydney, the difference between the lowest fare, $6,538 a person, and the third-lowest was about $1,400. Why couldn’t every human searcher find the same fare that the winner did? The fact that the travelers specified 15 destinations for their four-month-long trip meant that no single search engine had all the needed information.

Flightfox asks travelers who have already found a good fare on their own to make clear at the outset that they will award the finder’s fee only if a better price is found. The site also encourages travelers to consider awarding a finder’s fee for flights that may not be less expensive but have fewer stops or shorter layovers.

Human searchers can find flights that handle special requests, like traveling with a pet or a surfboard, to which a travel search engine remains oblivious. Todd Sullivan, a software developer and co-founder of Flightfox, says, “There are too many variables for it to be economically feasible to build an algorithm that covers every aspect of travel.”

Mr. Sullivan says the company has about 900 researchers, which it calls “experts,” who search fares on behalf of the sponsoring travelers. Anyone can apply to be an “expert”; Mr. Sullivan says applicants need only show evidence of the ability to find good fares.

About 20 percent of the Flightfox researchers are travel agents. Another large group are what Mr. Sullivan calls “flight hackers,” people who enjoy the sport of fare-hunting and frequent sites like FlyerTalk. “They do this at sites like this for free anyhow,” Mr. Sullivan says. “We’ve commercialized it.”

The other large group of researchers comprises frequent travelers seeking ways to make money to finance their travel. Mr. Sullivan says he and his co-founder, Lauren McLeod, were in this category when they started the company early this year.

The two say they have raised $800,000 in seed funding from Silicon Valley and Australian investors.

One of Flightfox’s experts is Michael Roizman, a medical student at the University of Queensland in Australia, who has not done a lot of traveling himself. Nonetheless, he won a contest that Flightfox set up for fun, challenging searchers to find the lowest possible fare for an itinerary that would begin and end in a North American city and would touch all other continents except Antarctica. Mr. Roizman’s winning fare was $1,730 for a trip that included stops in Guyana, Morocco, Istanbul, Kuala Lumpur and Perth, Australia.

“A flight search engine is blind to the opportunity to break up a complex itinerary into separate segments that originate in low-fare markets,” Mr. Roizman says.

He gives an example of a flight from Sydney to Germany. It’s much cheaper, he says, to start with an inexpensive flight from Sydney to Southeast Asia, then fly on to Germany on any of several low-fare carriers.

The contest for the 15-destination trip from Sydney was won by Monique Krestyn, a Flightfox expert in Massachusetts whose days are mostly filled with looking after five young children. “I have a cousin who is a computer geek,” she says, “and he once said that the only thing I could do better on a computer than him is find good flights.” He ran across an ad for Flightfox and brought it to her attention.

Ms. Krestyn recalls, “At first, I thought, ‘Where in the world are these experts finding these fares?’” It took about a week, she says, to become familiar with smaller airlines that don’t show up in travel search engines. She also discovered that fares “are priced differently depending on where you look — and where you are looking from.”

In that contest, she made $100, but more typically the winnings are $20 or $30. “It doesn’t sound like much, but it really does add up,” she says. “In three months, I’ve made $4,000 and that’s just utilizing my downtime when home and family aren’t demanding me.”

It’s most heartening to see that in the domain of travel planning, humans still manage to hold their own. Every contest concluded at Flightfox is a small win for the species.

Randall Stross, a professor of business at San Jose State University, is the author of “The Launch Pad,” published this month.

Bits Blog: Amazon Starts a Shopping Site for the Environmental Crowd

Amazon.com is going after the environmental crowd with a new site called Vine.com for buying green products.

Vine is part of Quidsi, the company that Amazon bought in 2010 that also runs sites like Diapers.com (baby stuff), Wag.com (pets) and YoYo.com (toys). Vine will sell everything from cleaning supplies to baby accessories, beauty supplies and clothes — as long as they are green.

That means wildly different things to different people, but Vine has created its own formula. Products must fall into one of the following categories: they must be designed to remove toxins, energy-efficient, natural, organic, powered by renewable energy, reusable, made of sustainable materials or water-efficient.

For example, bamboo cutting boards make the list because bamboo is sustainable. So do reusable cloth diapers, organic cotton bedding, low-flow shower heads, water filter pitchers and paraben-free cosmetics.

“This is a site that is not necessarily about saving the planet, though we feel the products are useful in that regard,” said Josh Dorfman, the site leader, who previously created the Lazy Environmentalist books and radio and TV shows. “It’s really saying to mom, ‘If you care about raising safe and healthy kids and you feel green products without chemicals can help along the way, we’ve figured out ways to help you do that.’”

A package that says natural is not enough, Mr. Dorfman said. Vine has asked vendors to verify that their products meet certain standards and has scanned ingredient lists to make sure they do not contain banned substances. Seventh Generation is an initial sponsor on the site.

Vine is catering to other civic-minded shopping trends, too, with sections stocked with fair trade products or products made within 100 miles of a shopper’s home.

None of this squares with the way people typically think of Amazon and the other e-commerce sites that it owns. Some small, local retailers say Amazon puts them out of business. Huge amounts of energy are spent operating warehouses, shipping products and wrapping them in bubble wrap and cardboard boxes.

“It’s a fair point that no matter how you’re going to engage in commerce, there’s going to be an environmental impact,” Mr. Dorfman said. “We’re not promising to be the greenest company right away, and we’re owning up to the fact that it’s not the way we operate across the entire company.”

It won’t be obvious on Vine.com that shoppers are buying from Amazon, just like on other e-commerce sites that Amazon owns, including Zappos.com, Shopbop.com and Woot. But it is another instance of Amazon’s spider-like reach in the online retailing world in its quest to sell people anything they want to buy.

Like Diapers.com and Quidsi’s other sites, Vine will deliver in one or two days, with the help of robots that pack boxes in the warehouse within minutes of an online order, and will emphasize customer service and easy returns. And Vine shoppers who just want a tube of Crest toothpaste or nonrecycled toilet paper can add items from other Quidsi sites to their shopping carts.