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Business Daily

Emojis: Love 'em or Hate 'em?

Business Daily

BBC

Business

4.4816 Ratings

🗓️ 14 July 2017

⏱️ 17 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

They're everywhere, but can businesses actually make any money out of them?

The programme includes Jeremy Burge, who has developed an Emojipedia business that catalogues the nearly 3,000 existing emoticons, Su Burtner, who successfully got a new cricket emoji accepted, and Keith Broni, the world's first emoji translator at Today Translations, guiding businesses through the shifting quagmire of emoji meanings. Ed Butler presents.

(Picture: Smiley emoji and poo emoji; Credit: denisgorelkin/Getty Images)

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hello, I'm Ed Butler and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Today, we are honouring the new global language of the emoji and the struggle for business to cash in.

0:15.7

They think, what's the dollar figure? How much money do I need to pay to get my own emoji? And big companies are

0:21.7

limited to, at the very most, proposing a generic version of their item. So how do you say it

0:27.1

with pictographs, plus one woman's ambition to christen her own emoji? I wish there was a way

0:33.3

to convey this distinct feeling of awkwardness. And the first thing that popped into my head was a

0:39.6

cricket. All will be explained in Business Daily from the BBC. Today, just ahead of World

0:50.8

Emoji Day on Monday, we're charting the rise and rise of the emoji.

0:56.2

Those text-based icons ranging from happy faces to snarling animals.

1:01.3

And in the pioneering spirit of Business Daily,

1:04.7

we are pioneering, I think you'll agree,

1:06.6

we'll be attempting to render them radiophonically throughout the show.

1:10.8

A bit like this.

1:12.1

Hmm. Yes, we have been doing a lot of thinking. So don't be alarmed. The emoji was invented in Japan back in the 1990s,

1:21.1

but first reached a global market in 2011. That was when Apple first included them on its iPhone, and the rest is SMS history.

1:30.6

Today, billions of emojis are transmitted every single second. Next month, Sony Pictures

1:35.8

launches the emoji movie in its honour. One emoticon was even pronounced the 2015 Word of

1:42.5

the Year by the Oxford English Dictionary.

1:49.6

Face with tears of joy.

1:52.6

There are today celebrity emojis, happy, sad, thoughtful, even obscene emojis.

1:59.4

What's wrong with us? Can't we speak anymore?

2:02.1

The BBC's Rahul Tandad has been out on the streets of Kolkata

2:05.0

to examine their appeal.

...

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