Newmoji

It all started for us back in 1997 - when Nicolas Loufrani had an idea to digitalise his Original Smiley design into a variety of emotions. His family were the people behind creating the Smiley brand. Nicolas found a way to put the first Smiley on a cellphone in 1996, thanks to a partnership with Alcatel. He then became (slightly) obsessed by the work of computer scientist Scott Fahlman, who had created ascii emoticons. Fahlman’s emoticons were a great idea, but no one could really work out what they meant, apart from a few... So Nicolas tried making sense of them, painstakingly translating these into a dictionary of 471 Smiley icons by 1999. Everyone thought he was still mad or bored, but he knew that emoticons would become a great way of communicating for the future that they could open up doors in helping young people develop their emotional intelligence. And guess what it did? He found it started to help people all around the world to communicate with each other. Thanks to Apple and Unicode, these dreams became reality in 2007, when Apple launched their first iPhone. And thanks to this, emoticons would go on to revolutionize the way we communicate with billions of them sent daily on messaging devices.