Today's tech tidbits consist of the Titanic making more money than sense, an irate reviewer who lets you know exactly what he thinks of his latest PVR, an interactive Google doodle and a glimpse at what YouTube would've looked like in the '90s...
China in his hand – No one, not even James Cameron, could have predicted just how popular his 3D interpretation of Titanic was going to be in China. The numbers speak for themselves: it grossed $67 million in its opening weekend, eclipsing the lifetime figures of the original version of Titanic, which was just $44 million. What allured the audience? Was it DiCaprio's Oirish jig? Winslet's hogging of the raft? We may never know but it has meant that it is getting a massive Blu-ray push in the country. [Deadline]
Bug bounty – Google has raised the amount it is offering to white hat hackers who find flaws in its application to a whopping $20,000 (£12,400). Considering it was just a snip over $3,000 Google is currently going through a generous streak – and a rather masochistic one. For the record, we would never pay people to point out our flaws. That's what the comment section is for, apparently. [Google Blog]
Zippity doo-da – Google's latest doodle centres around a person with the best name ever - Gideon Sundback. He was also the creator of the zip and Google has brilliantly woven this little known fact into its homepage. Considering Google changes its doodle as many times as Microsoft changes its Windows Phone marketing bosses, it's nice to see one that's wholly original. [Google, obv]
More Hurt to come – The producers of The Hurt Locker have decided that they are going to try once more to sue the pants off of thousands of bit-torrenters for copyright infringement. Whether this will recoup any losses remains to be seen, but this film seems to be singlehandedly keeping lawyers in biscuits. [Torrent Freak]
VH-yes – Ever wondered what YouTube would have looked like in the '90s? Nope, us either but someone has created a great video of how the site would have been promoted in the era of Brit Pop and Tony Blair. Brilliant stuff once again by Squirrel Monkey. [Kotaku]
Viddy cent – Viddy, the social video app, has gone and gotten itself some big-name backers, including Jay Z, Shakira and Biz Stone. Looks like tech start-ups are the new hangouts for celebrities. We blame The Social Network – everyone wants to be like Timberlake. [Digital Trends]
Smile properly – Japanese telcos are uniting to standardise the emoticon, because those pesky things have gotten waaaay out of hand. The Japanese emoji system is being sorted so that when you send an emoticon in the country, it will arrive in a text as, well, the same emoticon – apparently this doesn't always happen. Who knew a smile could cause so many first-world problems? [The Verge]
Black birds – Angry Birds Space has finally found its way on to the BlackBerry PlayBook. Yes it's late to the party, but RIM doesn't care. It's just glad it was allowed in this time – given that it actually got to the party first but was refused entry when the app first appeared and then was promptly pulled. [App World]
What a load of Kaka – Kaka is set to be first athlete with 10 million Twitter followers. Considering the majority of his tweets are sent in Portuguese (he's from Brazil), that's pretty good going. And to put it in some context Rooney's official Twitter account is merely at 3.9 million. And his tweets are similar to Kaka's as they barely contain English either. [Mashable]
Best review ever? – TechRadar gets a lot of kit in which we review by adhering to our strict reviews policy - this is one of the reasons why we are the biggest tech site in the UK. But sometimes we wish we could let our hair down like the person reviewing his Hauppauge DVR. Just brilliant. [Reddit]
