Emojis
In the 1990s, email was taking the world by storm. Communication in the digital era did away with long letters. On the flipside, it also reduced the emotional content of the messages --- it was not easy to gauge the mood of the person writing the message, leading to miscommunication. Kurita thought that pictorial cues could help to convey emotions, weather, situations, activities etc. He and his team then created a set of 176 12X12 pixel images, taking inspiration from Japanese comics. The images were called emoji --- Japanese for 'picture' (e) + 'character' (moji). It was targeted for the Japanese market, especially teenagers.
In the 2000s, emoji became visible across chatrooms and forums. In 2010, emoji characters were encoded in Unicode, the computing industry standard for most writing systems. With the release of Apple's iOS 5 in late 2011, they made their real international debut. Now emoji is universally accepted as a popular way of making our smartphone messages 'come alive'.
Emoji is different from emoticons. An emoticon is a smiley face created by a user by combining a group of characters, whereas an emoji is a single pre-defined image.
