🤔 🙊 🙄 🎉 🌯 🤓 This podcast is all about emoji. But it's really about how innovation really comes about -- through the tension between standards vs. proprietary moves; the politics of time and place; and the economics of creativity, from making to funding ... Beginning with a project on Kickstarter to crowd-translate Moby Dick entirely into emoji to getting dumplings into emoji form and ending with the Library of Congress and an "emoji-con". So joining us for this conversation are former VP of Data at Kickstarter Fred Benenson (and the man behind 'Emoji Dick') and former New York Times reporter and current Unicode emoji subcommittee member Jennifer 8. Lee (one of the women behind the dumpling emoji). cc @fredbenenson @jenny8lee @smc90

If you work in messaging, consumer/social, text, chat, language, sociology, language etc, this is a podcast worth listening too, even if you don't think you'd be interested in a discussion based around emoji. That said, most every a16z podcast is worth listening too, and this one is no different. Sonal is a great host and there are tons of fascinating directions in this episode from cultural meaning in symbols to how emoji are selected for inclusion.

Awesome! I refused to use it a year ago - who wants to tweet the way a 12 year old texts - but times have changed!! What really got me interested was this report by Swiftkey about the cultural differences in Emoji usage which you touched on in your podcast. Like the Finn's being the #1 users of emoji?? Or the popularity of the black moon face in scandinavia... https://www.scribd.com/doc/26759... Great stuff!! :) @fredbenenson @jenny8lee @smc90