The rise of Emoji. Influencing factors…

The rise of Emoji. Influencing factors…

Emoji are smileys or ideograms used in Japanese emails as well as web pages that are spreading outside Japan. The word “emoji” literally means “e” for “picture” plus “moji” for “character”. The characters are used the same as ASCII emoticons but it is offered in a much wider range. The icons are standardized and are built-in to the phone. The following Japanese mobile operators were the ones who first used emoji: au, NTT DoCoMo, and SoftBank Mobile formerly known as Vodafone Japan.

Since 2010, several Emoji character sets have been added into Unicode, which is a standard system for indexing characters. This permitted them to be standardized over various operating systems and be used outside Japan. From the time emoji were added to Apple’s iPhone and thereafter followed by Android and other mobile operating systems, emoji have become more and more popular.

Apple’s Mac OS X operating system supports emoji beginning with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. It was Shigetaka Kurita who created the first emoji in Japan. He was part of a team working on the i-mode mobile Internet platform of NTT DoCoMo, a Japanese mobile operator. The first set, which consists of 172 12 x 12 pixel emoji, was constructed as part of i-mode’s messaging features to assist in facilitating electronic communication and also to work as a unique feature from other services.