NTT DoCoMo’s mobile internet service that used the first widely influential emoji set was i-mode.
i-mode launched in Japan in 1999 and provided mobile email, web access, news, weather, entertainment, and other data services. Its compact pictographs helped users communicate visually on small phone screens and became a major part of the service’s character-based messaging culture.
The emoji associated with i-mode were designed by Shigetaka Kurita. They were not originally a worldwide standard: they were graphics used within a Japanese carrier ecosystem. Later, Unicode encoding and cross-platform implementations helped transform emoji from carrier-specific images into interoperable text characters and sequences.
A common mix-up is treating i-mode as the name of the emoji set itself. i-mode was the mobile internet service; the 176 symbols were the pictographs designed for use with that service.