Hi, I'm Matt. And I'm Tom. And we're at Electromagnetic Field festival.
That's the enormous hacker camp that's running all this weekend in the middle of the UK.
This isn't a normal video. We did a half-hour talk today. About Emojli, our emoji-only messenger app.
Yeah, you might remember the video of that from a few weeks ago but if that isn't your thing, there's some other videos around here you might be interested in.
And if you're watching on mobile, they're in the description
If that is your thing, then enjoy the talk
So, we were in Westfield Stratford,
in London, in the kind of hellhole of consumerism that is near the Olympic Park
I can not remember why we were there Matt: I think we both had a long day
and we were having a lovely sit down outside Jamie's Italian
Not in Jamie's Italian, just outside
Jamie's Italian is a restaurant, it's not just the person that Jamie Oliver knows
You want to take a step in, I'm not sure the camera can see you there
That might have been deliberate
And he says to me, um
You basically came up with the idea for an Emoji messenger
And I said, "Well I've had that idea", which was actually true
I had thought of that as well
But it was weird, no one else seemed to have done it yet
Everyone was talking about
Emoji because Unicode had just released,
Well just said they were releasing all these new Emoji coming out
Tom: yeah, there will now be a Unicode Spock hand
In the actual standard, which is wonderful
There's also, Reversed Victory Sign
That's in the speck now
And with there being a social network for everything
And everyone talking about Emoji
Yeah, because Yo had just come out
How that idea didn't collide in more people's head, we don't know
it urns out it had collided in a few other people's heads
And they might have got to market first, but I'll get to that in a minute
The important thing is
We got to reserving usernames first
On the overground, on the way home from Westfield Stratford
We came up with the name, I reserved the
domain Emoj.li on my phone
on the tube Wi-Fi Tom: Yeah
Because you can do that now
Welcome to 2014
and we thought this was going to be a really easy build
Its just an instant messenger
There's not going to be much on the backend, there's not going to be much on the frontend
We'll have it done in a week Matt: It can't be that hard
(quiet laughter from crowd)
Thank you! Bitter laughter from the front there
There is someone who tried to do this before
Yeah, um. So a week later we hadn't done it,
So I quickly cobbled together a thing that would take an email address
And a username, which of course had to be Emoji
and just sort of reserve it and send you an email saying
"Thanks we'll get to you soon"
And we figured that's fine, no one is going to pay any attention
And if know one pays any attention, which they won't
We can just say that it was a joke, and we can forget about it
And we put up a little video, just
as Tom and I do every so often
To explain what it was, and our idea
And then a few people saw that Tom: yeah yeah
Quite a few
So we have 70,000 usernames reserved
Matt: Within a couple of days
Seventy thousand
For a silly little idea we had on a bench at Westfield
Alright and the lovely thing is no one was bitter that their actual username they use
Because I'm "Tom Scotttt" on Instagram because I got there too late
Five T's if you count the one at the start
You can't do that, because if your username is Emoji you suddenly have the problem
That you can't type your name
Well, I- some people did
We had some really creative ones, have you looked through the username list?
I've seen a few, but i didn't see any actual people's names
Someone called Adam got one,
Because Emoji was based out of Japan
It has symbols for blood types in there
Which means you have A, B, and O in there
There is a D, something that looks like a D, and a chart that looks like an M
So you can get A, D, A, M
You can also, if you include the dollar sign as an S
get the word 'BOOB$'
Several people did
Yeah yeah, because there is also a little arrow with 'free' above it so...
We had 'free boobs' we had 'cool boobs'
We had,
Well I don't think there is anything beginning with F in there
Like there are some horoscope signs that kind of look a bit like, but no one managed to get
Actual, proper off-comm banned words in there
As far as I know, if you did don't take that as a challenge
We basically did, an Emoji spelling competition by accident
Yeah, and some people
Didn't seem to understand,
Like we thought we'd be nice and put an email address at the bottom if anyone had any questions about it
Don't do that Matt: Don't
No, no
Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of emails on the first day
People saying, "I tried to register a smiley face and it's not working, why doesn't that work?"
Because someone had got that one before you!
There are only 500 odd Emoji
You can use more than one
We have sent Tom: Sorry
We have sent literally hundreds of emails
Saying, "You have to use more than one"
Because that username will be taken
We've sent dozens of emails saying
"No, you can't have that because it's already taken"
we've sent at least 5 emails saying, "No your username has to be an Emoji"
I want to be careful,
Not being too nasty about people here because there are folk out there who are using this
English is not their first language
There are people out there who
Genuinely are not tech-savvy and still want part of this
And that's absolutely fine, but if you are tech-savvy enough to send me an email complaining about
The thing that is on the screen in front of you
So by this point, which is a couple of days in, this silly little idea we had on a bench
That we had no idea how we were actually going to make
Had turned into a support job
Technical support job, for one registration form
That we were doing in our spare time
Because we thought it was funny Tom: Thank you
There's a smattering of applause I don't know if the microphone will have picked that up
"Yeah, well done. Did you not see that coming? Really? Okay, good"
Yeah, we didn't
So then we had to build the thing
Can anyone guess, because I'm a professional web developer I guess
That's what i get paid for, I make
Web toys for a site called 'Us vs Th3m'
All the stuff I have to code for that is coded very quickly
Very very fast, we aim to be responsive and topical. So,
Using skills from that and you know, years of web development
Several years, in the 2000s of web development
Can anyone guess, what language the backend of Emojli is coded in
JavaScript? Oh no, JS that is
Matt: We'll get to that later Tom: That's way too modern
There we go! PHP
Matt: So we had split this up Tom: Boos, boos from the audience there
We had split it up so Tom was doing the backend
I was doing the frontend
So,
By day I'm a Broadcast Engineer
I don't program
I make little web things every so often
That not many people use
Guess what I made the app in?
Audience Member: Objective-C?
Both: No
Objective-C was the guess from the audience there, no
What was that? Audience Member: JS?
No, JS. You got that half right
The second half
HTML, CSS and JavaScript
I made an app
Now you might ask, if we're doing that, why did we not make that as a web app?
Given that's what it basically is
There are many browsers out there Tom: Yes
And none of them support Emoji Matt: At all
Hands up if you've actually looked and know how well Emoji is supported
Yeah I see Matt Sommerville there, who designed train times
Glin here, Glin in the front row is a security expert who is going to be having a field day after he's heard all this
By the way
Thanks to knowing him and running through this
Again, I don't want to issue this as an invitation
But I say as someone who designed it
I'm reasonably certain of the security of the stuff we are storing
Like no, genuinely, because we have a privacy policy
And I've had to register under the Data Protection Act
For the silly little idea we had, on a bench outside Westfield
Registering costs £35!
So we have an HTML chat as front end
Oh yeah, while I'm complaining about PHP
So, Emoji support, um browsers don't support it
iOS, because we are releasing for iPhone
iOS does support it really well, to be fair
You said we would come to that later Android
Eighh Matt: Noo
Windows Phone ha!
Because Windows Phone runs Internet Explorer
Matt: And that doesn't support
Emoji and JavaScript are not handled properly
They are treated as two characters and bundled together
If I say the worlds MySQL and Unicode
(collective uproar)
Matt: They are feeling your pain Tom: Yeah, on the backend,
How, I've made sure that the stuff that comes in
Which does come in really well, from Matt's JavaScript
The stuff that comes in, gets into the database and back out
Without getting munged, bearing in mind I'm using PHP and MySQL
Audience Member: Binary
Binary? Oh, no because UTFMB4 can still mess that up sometimes
Audience Member: Base 64
Base 64! There we go
Half of the crowd knows what I'm talking about and is going "Oh, did you really?"
Half of the crowd is going "I have no idea what that is, but I'm going to laugh anyways"
Put basically, we used what we knew to make something as quickly as possible Tom: Yup
I'll be honest, we were not going for quality Tom: Yup
It took us a month
And a bit
In our spare time
And it's now launched, we launched it yesterday because that's when Apple approved it
The first time Tom: Yeah
First time I've ever made an app
I didn't do it they way they wanted me to do it, and they approved it
I'm not saying Apple's review process isn't thorough
But it took them 11 minutes and they only looked at about a couple things in the app
Ten to midnight we got an email saying 'In Review'
(panicked noises) Panic! Panic! Pa-
Midnight, we got an email saying 'Preparing for App Store'
We submitted it a week beforehand, we had to wait for them to do that
What I love is that they sent the email at 10 minutes before midnight
Just before the date when we said we're going live with this thing
I'm not saying it sat in a bin for 6 days until someone went,
"Oh, oh they are meant to be launching that tomorrow. Guys, guy-" But I am saying that's what happened
In the meantime some things happened
People thought we were a startup
Many. People. Journalists, from web publications, newspapers Tom: Yup
I mean it used to be a big thing, like
Ten years ago, you said, "We got coverage in Time Magazine"
That would be really impressive
Now a days Time Magazine is just Buzzfeed but they're not admitting it
Like getting a review in Time Magazine requires sending it to them
Because they'll go, "Oh my God that's content we can use it!"
I don't understand how people think that two white middle class males
Can't have an idea and it not being a startup
We just made a silly thing
We look like we're going to be Silicon Valley types
Looking for enormous amounts of investment in this
We look like we're going to be the two
I'm going to use the phrase "Douchbag Tech Bros" if I can say it
In t-shirts
Yeah
Launching an app because that's the way to make
A lot of money
No, we kind of just had a stupid idea
Bring on the dollars
Yeah, the tech press disagrees and at least one investment fund that has emailed us recently disagrees
So we got a call with them at some point
Now I'll be honest for this silly idea that we've had
Which I may have mentioned this before
We'd thought it would be quick Tom: No
And we thought it would be over very quickly Tom: No
Now we have no spare time to do Tom: Yup
We have no,
No one has payed us anything for it so we have spent some of our own money doing it
You might guess at what our intentions of continuing to put a lot of effort into this might be at the moment
It's not high
And the thing is it works
It works reliably, like we have
Quite a lot of people using it now
We sent 70,000 emails yesterday
To people who had reserved and confirmed their usernames
That was from here by the way
Tom: Oh yeah, that was from the lounge Matt: We're here this weekend
Partly in the lounge, partly in his tent
I mean some of those emails like literally came from my phone
Because that was where the app was running
And the thing is if you send 70,000 emails to people and they are on twitter and they are saying,
"Oh my username is Aubergine No Under 18s"
Which is actually someone's username
Shout out there to Aubergine No Under 18s
We thought there was no way we would have to mark this as adult rated
There's nothing you can do with Emoj- no.
Because the thing is under the Data Protection Act
You have to list on your Data Protection Act submission
The possible things you might be storing about people, does it include sensitive data
And they give an example of what sensitive data might include
And it includes details about people's sexuality
And I went, "Well no, obviously not, that's not, Emoji"
"There's a two men holding hands Emoji that you could use"
Oh for God's sake
So I have to *laughs* Thank you Tom!
What's your username Tom?
Tom: Trademark Two Men Holding Hands
"Trademark Two Men Holding Hands"
I'm being really careful with password security on this thing
The thing is
People haven't used Emojli to converse yet
Properly Tom: Yeah, wait no there's been a few
I saw a friend of mine get, 'cup of tea?'
And responded with a smiley face, so you know that's technically a conversation
The basics, the basics are there
But, as soon as you go out of your friendship circle
Or your known interests or your commonalities
The sort of understanding of what you might mean
In these silly little pictures that don't actually mean anything
That you are using to converse with, gets a bit skewed
A few people tried to interview us by sending a load of
Emojis, which we had no idea what they were on about
So we guessed something and sent it back, and they had no idea what we meant
But they published it Matt: Yup
Ah, I haven't mentioned
Thing where, I mean we took a month to go from here's your username to here's your app
in that month, two other Emoji-only messengers launched
Neither of which got any press because we kinda spoiled it for them
One of which is called Emojli
I wonder where they got that name from
Now, to be fair, we emailed them
And we said, "uh, guys you, um..."
Well, guy it was one name on the thing,
"You're using the same name as us"
"You registered your domain 3 weeks after we launched"
"And you've registered your Twitter, which is our name with a couple of letters on the end of it"
"several weeks after we launched"
"Did you not notice?"
If you were starting something, you'd google the name you came up with first to see if anyone else was there Tom: Yeah, that's a thing you would do
And they said, "No, no we've been planing this for a while"
Oh really?
21 5-star reviews on their app
All in slightly one sentence pigeon english
They've all vanished now, I can't imagine why. There's no reviews for it anymore
Still slightly ahead of us on the app store which is really annoying
You know why? Because we are getting tech support requests for there app!
"I can't find where to unlock my username" Yeah, wrong app
"I can't talk to my frie-" Wrong app
Yes....
Don't build an app Tom: Yeah that's basically what we are saying because
The economics doesn't make sense, no one will make money off this
The support time doesn't make sense
You have to think about you're own personal knowledge and skills
If they involve, making apps Tom: Yeah
Then you might have a chance
Thing is we now have to update this for our site, because it doesn't work on our site
And we've had a few emails saying, "Why doesn't it work on iOS 6"
Never mind Android, we'll get to that later
Why doesn't work on iOS 6?
And the real answer for that is: I tried running it on iOS 6, and it didn't work
It works on iOS 7
So, tick the box: "Not on iOS 6"
Because I had spent a month on this bloody thing
Which I thought was going to be a quick thing Tom: I don't want to come across as ungrateful
Because we've got 70,000 usernames on this thing
And that's really cool
Like, we've made a thing
And it's great, unfortunately we've now made a millstone that is around our neck
So, that's not good
I think I've dealt with 100 tech support requests this morning
90% of which were actually dealt with by the automatic vacation response
That I put on the GMail thing saying "We're a bit busy this will probably solve it"
So let's open the floor to questions!
Let's, yeah guy over there in the really cool skeleton hoodie
If you could yell really loud then we'll repeat your question so other people can hear
Audience Member: Have you tried selling the app to the other person who wants to copy you?
Have we tried selling the app to the other person that has the app?
No, what I think we actually did was file a request with Apple
Saying "They kind of nicked our name"
And as you might expect Apple's response to that was nothing, absolutely nothing Matt: They didn't reply
I'm going to take Glyn, your hand was up first
Glyn: Dear Emojli's Tom Scott
Oh dear
Glyn: When are you going to go public with your first round of shares?
When are we going to go public with out first round of shares
Now the thing is, I don't want to be too cynical here because we do have,
70,000 usernames there, like some of them haven't been pulled out yet
Because they are waiting for an Android release
If someone were to come along and say, "Yeah, we actually want to take this off your hands, because this is a thing that would start"
Yeah, okay. They're welcome to it, but we're not start up people, we're not business people
We're not businessmen
We really don't want to run a start up
And the thing is we may have sounded bitter at it, that's mainly because we had spent a month of all of our spare time
We both have full time jobs
Which can be reasonably demanding
And we are spending every waking moment trying to make this thing
So we might be sounding a bit more Both: Bitter
Then we could be otherwise
But I'm certainly very proud of the fact that we know bugger-all about making apps
And we seemed to have made one and launched one and got 70,000 registrations on it
So if it turns out that some investor wants it, then lovely
But I suggest that they find the tech team
And you put it into something they already have
Rather than trying to give us vague incompetence money to do it
We don't want it to die
Yeah, but we don't really want it to live either
We, we don't have the time to keep it alive
Guy in the green top there
Audience Member: When did you realize that internet start up culture had gone beyond parody
When did we realize that internet start up culture had gone beyond parody
Matt: Yo? Tom: Yo.
Both: Yo
Not, Yo; when Yo got investment
Matt: Yes Tom: When Yo got more then $1,000,000 from an investment fund
That is the point, they've pivoted now by the way
Pivot means, "Oh dear that idea didn't work start everything over fresh again"
They are now a proper notification service because that, that's good
That'll work
In fact, while I'm thinking of this, my favourite quote from the review of us
Oh yeah! We got reviews
My favourite was, I can't remember the exact wording, something along the lines of
"Finally, we found something worse than Yo"
(Crowd cheers)
And so I thought, well we need something in our app store description
So I put two good quotes and that on the bottom
I'm not going to say they're wrong
Uh, yup, just there
Audience Member: Have you tried replacing UTF-8 sequences with actual images?
Yes, have we tried replacing UTF-8 sequences with images
Yes, there is
There's a library for doing that in JavaScript
What I basically do for the website, because there is only a couple places you need it on the web
In most cases people were looking at through a phone's browser that would automatically do the replacement anyway
What I'm actually using is a font stack
On Apple you can use, obviously the Emoji font, Android has an Emoji font
On Windows there's actually a font on Windows 7 and later
Called Segoe UI Symbol
Which includes full list of Emojis
With pictograms for all of them
So in most cases it's use that
The trouble is that there are no copyright-free or creative commons or easily licensed sets of Emoji right now
That's one of the big problems we have
Is that we either have to get someone to draw every Emoji for us
Yeah, "Use the investment money for that", he says
Audience Member: Put it on Kickstarter
Someone did! No, someone said, "Put it on Kickstarter", and there was a Kickstarter for open Emojis
And it got an enormous amount of money
And then it got about 10% of the way through and they said nope
Tom: No! Matt: Nope
Tom: It's not finished
Github I think is basically just using Apple's
And converting them into images
And because Githib are really cool no one really minds
I don't think Apple would really mind
Quite a few places have been using their images and using them....
There is a question about whether you can copyright a font
What is a font, what is a series of images
If they package up a series of images as a font does that make it copyrightable
We don't want to get involved in that which is one of the reasons we are just using the native UI
Matt looks like he has something to add
Matt (Audience): Ask the users to draw their usernames
Ask the user to what?
To draw their username
Matt: I don't know how to do that, sorry Tom: No, do you know what that's going to get us
That is going to get us, drawing of a cock, drawing of a cock, drawing of a cock
I am not moderating 10,000 pictures like that
Just to try and get a list I would rather pay to have someone draw them
Then have to go through and Matt: What cocks?
That's a job I could take
I'm going to stop this before it goes beyond the code of conduct here
In all seriousness
Anyone else from the floor with a question that will not go
And I'll not be dragged down in an incredibly terrible alley
Yeah, okay guy on the left
Right
Audience Member: It's not been asked. You've been avoiding,
You said we would come to that later Android
Tom: Android, Yes Matt: Okay, so
The backend will support it
Yeah, No worries
I'll give you a bit more background on how the app has been developed
Tom: All yours Matt: I've used Cordova or PhoneGap
It seems to have two names I don't quite understand why
Which is a way of packaging a website into an app
And that's vaguely cross-platform
Tom: Vaguely
But, for you to be able to test things reasonably well you need to have the devices
I have an iPhone, I have an iPad
So that's why I've gone with iOS is because I can test it
Okay, it might not be the best app in the world currently
But I have some standards
And that app the is currently out has passed those standards
Because I've been able to test them
I don't have an Android device
We've already put quite a bit of money into this to get it going, I don't want to,
Buy one, the amount of time taken
The code isn't going to be, you know, directly portable
Also, that means on the backend there are Android push notifications
Which are even more interesting the Apple's push notifications
I forgot about the push notifications
Yeah, right, okay here's the problem
I mentioned the PHP, I mentioned the JavaScript
Push notifications, I'm using a library. Because of course you use a library
That makes, a lot of sense
Push notification attempt #1
"? has sent you ?"
#2 "/? has sent you /?" no
Attempt #3 "///? has se-" no
Attempt #4 "/x21-"
I caught many different places at this point
What Tom hasn't mentioned is, for push notifications to work
And basically for anything Apple to work you have to generate certificates
You have to have a server certificate You have to have a user certificate You have to have an app certificate
And a developer certificate, and then also for the push notifications you have to have a sandbox certificate
That only works on his phone
And we weren't in the same place
And because we had all the certificates on my laptop
I would need his phone in my room to be able to put it so
So each one of those wasn't just me going *taptaptap* "oh that didn't work"
It was *taptaptapTAP* Matt: And then I get a push notification with a load of gobbledygook
Which I would screenshot and iMessage back to him
And then he would send back to me some swear words, or things along that line
Reversed Victory Hand
Both: Yeah...
That answers the Android question more or less
I think we have about 5 to 10 minutes left
Matt: Yeah about 5 minutes Tom: Anyone else?
Oh, blimey alright let's go right to left
Guy in the blue, oh hi Alex!
Alex: Why not take the money?
Why not take the money?
Okay,
We really don't want to quit our jobs to do this
We both have jobs we enjoy
In its current timescale, as of finishing yesterday when we launched it
Still classes as fun
We're not app developers we don't want this as our job
Like we would happily take the money and give it to someone else
And I'm sure at some point, we have a price
And we're willing to discuss that if anyone wants to take it and make it
But we don't want to spend the next year of our lives being acqui-hired by some big corporation
And doing something we don't enjoy
We've already got our careers which we're set in and we like doing
Why would we leave that for something that isn't fun
And isn't going to last because it's an app in an app bubble
And let's be honest, when we said Yo got $1.2 Million in funding
That doesn't mean that they are walking out with $600k- well no there's four of them
So they aren't walking out with $300k each
Matt: That comes with conditions Tom: That comes with them working there for a year
And hiring other people to make it work
I can't see, well we're in an app bubble now
That's fairly obvious I think
We're in the same kind of bubble as the Dot Com bubble before it
They will walk out of that probably with a decent salary for the time they spent on it
We got that, on things we actually enjoy
I'm getting payed to work at 'Us vs Th3m' three days a week
And the rest of the time I'm making videos for YouTube and looking at TV stuff
That's what I want to do
Yeah, I'm a Broadcast Engineer I like doing that
I'm having great fun doing that; I'm going to keep doing that
If they keep employing me Tom: So if someone wants to take
Wants to, buy out the thing
And take it and run with it and give it to a team who can actually make something good with it
hello@emoj.li Tom: Yeah
But there's not much, and there's not much we can usefully do
There are ways, I'm assuming you can monetize it? Tom: Yeah
One of many suggestions we've had, but we don't have the skill, we don't have the time, we don't have the, will
So, that's why, to answer that question
So we've got, one minute left I think
Matt: And then we need to leave the stage Tom: Let's take the last couple, well, how are we doing?
I think we're alright, let's take one or two more
Ha! Okay. Very quickly, there were two hands up there
Is anyone else going to take that question, who was it
Audience Member: Do you have a trademark yet?
Do we have a trademark? Both: Nope!
You know why? Trademarks cost money
You know what we are not spending any more on this?
No more money
Because the Apple developer set thing cost money
And the SSL certificate, because we are running fully SSL, cost money
The hosting! I need to mention the hosting Matt: Oh yes
Bytemark. Bytemark are also sponsoring the hosting for EMF Camp
Which is where we are for those watching this online
Matt: They very very generously offered to host Tom: Yes, seriously I just
They said, "I can we host?"
And I said, "Yeah, we need an SSL server and it will need to handle this load"
And it just stayed up overnight with 70,000 emails being sent out and it has worked
They are good at what they do
They also host 'Us vs Th3m', where I work, although that gets paid for
I can't stress how good they are enough, actually
So there's one more, please make this a good question to close on
The pressure is on you, this is the last question
I'm not saying this has to be a good question to end it with, but Matt: *Ascending groan*
Audience Member: What are you going to do with all of the conversation data and are you going to use it for natural language processing?
Alright, so are we going to do anything with the conversation data, and are we going to do natural language processing on it
We're not Facebook, we're not OkCupid, we're not going to run experiments on our users
While technically our privacy policy says that we can use it for internal record keeping and things like that
We're not
It's not
No! Matt: In fact, I can modify the question slightly:
"Are we going to do anything?"
Both: No
Tom: That's Matt Gray! Matt: And he's Tom Scott
Thank you
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