TiVo co-founders joining forces for yet another set-top box

How on earth are you supposed to fill your days after leaving the successful set-top box company you created? Well, if you're TiVo co-founders Mike Ramsay and Jim Barton, the answer is to start all over again. You see, after Barton resigned from TiVo in early 2012, he and long-gone chum Ramsay set up InVisioneer, which has the pair "gearing up to do it again." Domain registrations, online polls and a barebones Twitter account serving up YouTube links are among the footprints Zatz Not Funny has been following to see what the new company is up to. Job listings say the outfit's crafting "a product that sits at the nexus of exciting trends in video, mobile, and social." It seems to have already passed through the FCC in the form of Qplay, a small TV adapter with HDMI-out and an iPad app for controlling it (according to the user manual).

Most recently, a little more info popped up on InVisioneer's site, but has subsequently been taken down. This included word that Qplay will provide "new ways to discover, play and share video content," as well as imagery of an iPad app with YouTube and Vine among the tabs. With so many ways to get content from the web to your TV already, we'd hope for Ramsay and Barton's sake that Qplay has an innovative hook. They probably don't need reminding, though -- they're partly responsible for how saturated the market is in the first place.

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Australian watchdog forces Apple to offer 24-month warranties as standard

Apple's had its hand slapped over its product warranties more times than it cares to remember. In its latest brush with competition regulators, the company has been hit with a court order from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) following claims it was misleading customers over their rights to a replacement, refund or repair on faulty products. Similar to its actions in Europe, the ACCC alleges that staff incorrectly applied the company's own warranty policies, including its 14-day return policy and 12-month manufacturer warranty, instead of guarantees required by Australian consumer law.

The ACCC says Apple has agreed to bring its return and repair policies in line with local laws and will now provide consumers with coverage for a minimum of 24 months -- like it does in Europe and other parts of the world. It's not the first time Apple has had run-ins with the ACCC either, last year it was fined AU$2.29 million ($2 million) for "deliberately" misleading customers over the 4G capabilities of its new iPad. Australian customers will soon be able to visit a new webpage on the Apple Store which clarifies the differences between the company's own policies and those set out by law, putting an end to warranty confusion once and for all.

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