Latest news with #Docomo
Wall Street Journal
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Face With Tears of Joy' Review: Smartphone Hieroglyphics
'Emoji Dick,' a line-by-line translation into emoji of Herman Melville's 1851 novel, 'Moby-Dick,' was published in 2010. Five years later, the Oxford English Dictionary chose the 'face with tears of joy' emoji as its word of the year. Today there are north of 3,500 accepted emoji characters, many of which have become inescapable in digital communication. Is this increasingly widespread visual lexicon a language of its own? Linguists and language pedants generally say no. In 'Face With Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji,' Keith Houston, weighing the evidence, concurs. He asserts, however, that there is 'a richness of emoji usage that rivals any language.' That, too, might rankle the pedants, but the author, an emoji aficionado, mounts an energetic case. Mr. Houston opens with a brisk history that identifies distant ancestors of the emojis you find on your phone, forebears that can include symbols found on ancient scrolls and 18th-century Buddhist texts. The term 'emoji' derives from combining the Japanese words for 'picture' and 'written character.' Shigetaka Kurita, a software engineer, is often credited with creating the first set of emojis, which the Japanese cellular provider Docomo launched in 1999, but researchers have found emoji-like characters, including precursors to today's familiar smiley faces and hearts, on Japanese word processors dating back to the 1980s. An emoji relative, the emoticon, which combines keyboard characters to make simple pictorial symbols, first appeared in 1982: A Carnegie Mellon computer scientist proposed to colleagues on an electronic bulletin board that they type three punctuation marks in sequence— ':-)'—to indicate when they were being facetious. Google and Apple helped the system go global with smartphone operating systems that used emojis liberally. Doing so required the support of the Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit organization that ensures that digitized characters and symbols are compatible across networks and devices.
23-06-2025
- Business
INTERVIEW: Bank's New Name to Feature 'Docomo'
Newsfrom Japan Tokyo, June 23 (Jiji Press)--The word of 'Docomo' will be included in the name of the Japanese bank that NTT Docomo Inc. last month agreed to acquire, Yoshiaki Maeda, president and CEO of the mobile phone operator, said in an interview. The move is designed to make customers aware that the bank will offer telecommunications and financial services in an integrated way. NTT Docomo plans to acquire a stake of nearly two-thirds in SBI Sumishin Net Bank. Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank will own the remainder. Maeda emphasized that financial business is a key area for NTT Docomo after telecommunications. Banking will be 'in the center' of financial services including credit cards, installment investments and mortgages, he said. [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]
Kyodo News
08-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Kyodo News
Japan telecom giant NTT Docomo to end own emoji after 26 yrs
KYODO NEWS - 5 hours ago - 10:40 | All, Japan Japanese telecom giant NTT Docomo Inc. will retire its set of original emoji whose release 26 years ago helped shape the visual language of today's digital communications. The carrier's Android smartphones and feature phones marketed from June will not come with the Docomo emoji set. Announcing the decision in late May, the firm said they had "fulfilled their role" while noting that Google's emoji had become more common globally. The new mobile phones will adopt Noto Color Emoji by Google or Samsung emoji instead, it said. The Docomo emoji were introduced in 1999 with the company's i-mode service, an Internet-capable mobile phone system that the company also plans to terminate, in 2026. Emoji became massively popular in Japan as an element of texting, especially among teenagers in the 2000s, with some creating emoji-only messages, before taking root globally. In 2016, NTT Docomo's set of 176 emoji was included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, with the museum stating, "Filling in for body language, they reassert the human within the deeply impersonal, abstract space of electronic communication."
The Mainichi
08-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Mainichi
Japan telecom giant NTT Docomo to end own emoji after 26 yrs
TOKYO (Kyodo) -- Japanese telecom giant NTT Docomo Inc. will retire its set of original emoji whose release 26 years ago helped shape the visual language of today's digital communications. The carrier's Android smartphones and feature phones marketed from June will not come with the Docomo emoji set. Announcing the decision in late May, the firm said they had "fulfilled their role" while noting that Google's emoji had become more common globally. The new mobile phones will adopt Noto Color Emoji by Google or Samsung emoji instead, it said. The Docomo emoji were introduced in 1999 with the company's i-mode service, an Internet-capable mobile phone system that the company also plans to terminate, in 2026. Emoji became massively popular in Japan as an element of texting, especially among teenagers in the 2000s, with some creating emoji-only messages, before taking root globally. In 2016, NTT Docomo's set of 176 emoji was included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, with the museum stating, "Filling in for body language, they reassert the human within the deeply impersonal, abstract space of electronic communication."
Kyodo News
08-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Kyodo News
Japan telecom giant NTT Docomo to end own emoji after 26 yrs
KYODO NEWS - 19 minutes ago - 10:40 | All, Japan Japanese telecom giant NTT Docomo Inc. will retire its set of original emoji whose release 26 years ago helped shape the visual language of today's digital communications. The carrier's Android smartphones and feature phones marketed from June will not come with the Docomo emoji set. Announcing the decision in late May, the firm said they had "fulfilled their role" while noting that Google's emoji had become more common globally. The new mobile phones will adopt Noto Color Emoji by Google or Samsung emoji instead, it said. The Docomo emoji were introduced in 1999 with the company's i-mode service, an Internet-capable mobile phone system that the company also plans to terminate, in 2026. Emoji became massively popular in Japan as an element of texting, especially among teenagers in the 2000s, with some creating emoji-only messages, before taking root globally. In 2016, NTT Docomo's set of 176 emoji was included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, with the museum stating, "Filling in for body language, they reassert the human within the deeply impersonal, abstract space of electronic communication."
