i-mode

1999년 NTT 도코모가 출시한 모바일 인터넷 플랫폼으로, 최초의 이모지가 탄생한 곳.

i-mode was a revolutionary mobile internet service launched by NTT DoCoMo in Japan in February 1999. At its peak, it had over 50 million subscribers and pioneered mobile internet concepts that later became standard worldwide.

Emoji were created for i-mode because the service needed a way to express emotions and concepts within the constraints of early mobile messaging. The 176 original emoji became hugely popular, leading rival carriers (SoftBank, au/KDDI) to create their own incompatible emoji sets.

This fragmentation eventually drove the push to standardize emoji through Unicode, with Google and Apple submitting proposals in 2007-2009.