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 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 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 Tom: No!
Matt: Nope 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 [Translating these subtitles? Add your name here!]
A ridiculous app that transcends absurdity?
Hmmm...I sense a "Nathan for You" bit, just waiting to be written and produced...
Enjoyed the talk, but think the guy on the right needs to be a bit more.... controlled?