Colonial Boulevard continuous flow intersection opens Sunday in Fort MyersSun and clouds with a stray shower possible
FORT MYERS Colonial Boulevard continuous flow intersection opens Sunday in Fort Myers Drivers along Interstate 75 near Colonial Boulevard can expect changes soon.
the weather authority Sun and clouds with a stray shower possible The Weather Authority says sun and clouds overhead will lead to another day with above-average temperatures.
FORT MYERS LCSO offering youth boxing program The Lee County Sheriff’s Office youth boxing program is your kid’s golden ticket to mastering the art of self-defense.
CAPE CORAL Cape Coral man speaks on helping apprehend armed 13-year-old The man who helped apprehend an armed 13-year-old spoke on the incident.
NAPLES Naples Cars on Fifth event fuels $2M for local charity efforts For over two decades, car enthusiasts in Southwest Florida have gathered on Fifth Avenue in Naples.
MARCO ISLAND Caxambas Park boat ramp on Marco Island set to reopen Collier County announced the reopening of the Caxambas Park boat ramp on Marco Island.
CAPE CORAL Cape Coral Animal Shelter to host Puppy Bowl 3 ahead of big game Ahead of the big game on Sunday, Cape Coral Animal Shelter will be featuring its very own Puppy Bowl III.
FORT MYERS From the ballpark to the beach: the Minnesota Twins are back for Spring Training 1700 miles later the Twins truck is here and the team from Minnesota is ready to spend the next six weeks here in Fort Myers.
the weather authority Warm stretch continues throughout this weekend The Weather Authority says if you are a fan of the warmer weather, you are going to love this weekend.
SANIBEL Sanibel’s red tide raises health alerts and wildlife concerns With great weather in the forecast, it’s shaping up to be a perfect beach weekend. However, visitors to the barrier islands should exercise caution.
NAPLES Naples Automotive Experience raises funds for St. Matthew’s House The Naples Automotive Experience brought excitement and philanthropy to the community, raising money for St. Matthew’s House.
MATLACHA Little Pine Island bridge work causes delays, FDOT promises progress Construction on the Little Pine Island Bridge has narrowed traffic to one lane, causing significant delays for drivers.
SOUTHWEST FLORIDA Support women’s heart health on National Wear Red Day The first Friday in February marks National Wear Red Day!
Ongoing repairs following Naples plane crash A deadly plane crash that occurred one year ago in Naples, Florida continues to impact lives in Southwest Florida. The tragic event involved two pilots who lost their lives on Interstate 75.
FORT MYERS Colonial Boulevard continuous flow intersection opens Sunday in Fort Myers Drivers along Interstate 75 near Colonial Boulevard can expect changes soon.
the weather authority Sun and clouds with a stray shower possible The Weather Authority says sun and clouds overhead will lead to another day with above-average temperatures.
FORT MYERS LCSO offering youth boxing program The Lee County Sheriff’s Office youth boxing program is your kid’s golden ticket to mastering the art of self-defense.
CAPE CORAL Cape Coral man speaks on helping apprehend armed 13-year-old The man who helped apprehend an armed 13-year-old spoke on the incident.
NAPLES Naples Cars on Fifth event fuels $2M for local charity efforts For over two decades, car enthusiasts in Southwest Florida have gathered on Fifth Avenue in Naples.
MARCO ISLAND Caxambas Park boat ramp on Marco Island set to reopen Collier County announced the reopening of the Caxambas Park boat ramp on Marco Island.
CAPE CORAL Cape Coral Animal Shelter to host Puppy Bowl 3 ahead of big game Ahead of the big game on Sunday, Cape Coral Animal Shelter will be featuring its very own Puppy Bowl III.
FORT MYERS From the ballpark to the beach: the Minnesota Twins are back for Spring Training 1700 miles later the Twins truck is here and the team from Minnesota is ready to spend the next six weeks here in Fort Myers.
the weather authority Warm stretch continues throughout this weekend The Weather Authority says if you are a fan of the warmer weather, you are going to love this weekend.
SANIBEL Sanibel’s red tide raises health alerts and wildlife concerns With great weather in the forecast, it’s shaping up to be a perfect beach weekend. However, visitors to the barrier islands should exercise caution.
NAPLES Naples Automotive Experience raises funds for St. Matthew’s House The Naples Automotive Experience brought excitement and philanthropy to the community, raising money for St. Matthew’s House.
MATLACHA Little Pine Island bridge work causes delays, FDOT promises progress Construction on the Little Pine Island Bridge has narrowed traffic to one lane, causing significant delays for drivers.
SOUTHWEST FLORIDA Support women’s heart health on National Wear Red Day The first Friday in February marks National Wear Red Day!
Ongoing repairs following Naples plane crash A deadly plane crash that occurred one year ago in Naples, Florida continues to impact lives in Southwest Florida. The tragic event involved two pilots who lost their lives on Interstate 75.
MGN NEW YORK (AP) – When it comes to emojis, the future is very, very … Face with Tears of Joy. If you don’t know what that means then you: a) aren’t a 14-year-old girl. b) love to hate those tiny pictures that people text you all the time. Or c) are nowhere near a smartphone or online chat. Otherwise, here in 2016, it’s all emojis, all the time. And Face with Tears of Joy, by the way, is a bright yellow happy face with a classic, toothy grin as tears fall. The Face was chosen by Oxford Dictionaries as its 2015 “word” of the year, based on its popularity and reflecting the rise of emojis to help charitable causes, promote businesses and generally assist oh-so-many-more of us in further expressing ourselves on social media and in texts. The Beyhive knows. The collective fan base of Beyonce recently spammed Amber Rose with little bumblebee emojis when they sensed a diss of their queen. Taco Bell also knows. Emoji overseers approved a taco character last year after a yearlong campaign by the company to get one up and running, rewarding users of said taco on Twitter with gifts of free photos, GIFs and other virtual playthings to celebrate. So what’s it all about? Here’s a look at the past, present and rosy future of emojis: ___ WHERE DID THEY COME FROM? While there’s now a strict definition of emojis as images created through standardized computer coding that works across platforms, they have many, many popular cousins by way of “stickers,” which are images without the wonky back end. Kimojis, the invention of Kim Kardashian, aren’t technically emojis, for instance, at least in the eyes of purists. In tech lore, the great emoji explosion has a grandfather in Japan and his name is Shigetaka Kurita. He was inspired in the 1990s by manja and kanji when he and others on a team working to develop what is considered the world’s first widespread mobile Internet platform came up with some rudimentary characters. They were working a good decade before Apple developed a set of emojis for the first iPhones. Emojis are either loads of fun or the bane of your existence. One thing is sure: There’s no worry they’ll become a “language” in and of themselves. While everybody from Coca-Cola to the Kitten Bowl have come up with little pictographs to whip up interest in themselves, emojis exist mainly to nuance the words regular folk type, standing in for tone of voice, facial expressions and physical gestures – extended middle finger emoji added recently. “Words aren’t dead. Long live the emoji, long live the word,” laughed Gretchen McCulloch, a Toronto linguist who, like some others in her field, is studying emojis and other aspects of Internet language. Emojis have been compared to hieroglyphs, but McCulloch is not on board. That ancient picture-speak included symbols with literal meaning, but others stood in for actual sound. Emoji enthusiasts have played with telling word-free stories using their little darlings alone and translating song lyrics into the pictures, “but they can’t be put together like letters to make a pronounceable word,” McCulloch said. ___ THE EMOJI OVERSEERS Back when Kurita was creating some of the first emojis, chaos already had ensued in trying to make all the pagers and all the emerging mobile phones and the newfangled thing called email and everything else Internet-ish that was bubbling up speak to each other. And also to allow people in Japan used to a more formal way of communicating make themselves understood in the emerging shorthand. Enter the Unicode Consortium, on the coding end. It’s a volunteer nonprofit industry organization working in collaboration with the International Organization for Standardization, the latter an independent non-governmental body that helps develop specifications for all sorts of things, including emojis, on a global scale. Unicode, co-founded and headed by Mark Davis in Zurich, has a big, big mission, of which emojis have a place: making sure all the languages in the world are encoded and supported across platforms and devices. The key word here is volunteer. Davis has a whole other job at Google, but he has dedicated himself to the task above. He also co-chairs the consortium’s emoji subcommittee, a cog in a vetting process for new emojis that can take up to two years before new ones are put into the Unicode Standard for the likes of Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook to do with what they wish. Where does Davis sit with the rapid rise of emojis? “It has been a surprise. We didn’t fully understand how popular they were going to be,” he said. At the moment, Unicode has released 1,624 emojis, with more options when you factor in modifiers for such things as skin tone. The emoji subcommittee fields about 100 proposals for new emojis a year. Not all make it through the vetting process. “We don’t encode emoji for movie or fictional people, or for deities. And we’re not going to give you a Donald Trump,” Davis said. Gender, he said, is among the next frontiers for emojis. Demand for a female runner, for instance, will be voted on in May as critics have questioned a male-female divide. The consortium is trying to come up with a way to more easily and quickly customize emoji for gender, hair color and other features, Davis said. “Personally, I am very much looking forward to a face palm emoji,” he joked. ___ EMOJI LOVERS AND HATERS Meet Elle Brown. She’s a 9-year-old “kidpreneur” from Plant City, Florida. She makes emoji-theme jewelry and key fobs that she sells at school and church, and that her mom sells from her desk at an insurance firm. “My favorite one is the “poo” emoji, and the money emoji,” said Elle. People of all ages buy from her mom, Zee Brown. “It’s like having Girl Scout cookies. People come to me,” she said. While marketers are all over emojis these days, professional brander Kevin Winslow in Boise, Idaho, was a reluctant adopter. “I thought they were rather silly. It didn’t seem to me like something a grown-up would use,” he said. “Now they’re a necessity in social media campaigns. Sometimes they help do away with the exclamation point, which I also despise.” Vivian Rosenthal is founder and head of Snaps, a platform on which keyboards full of branded images are launched, including marketing campaigns intended to support social causes, such as the plight of refugees. With nearly half of all Instagram posts now including at least one emoji and with more than 270 billion text messages sent a day across all mobile devices, brands are trying big time to monetize emojis, Rosenthal said. “Basically, messaging is social 2.0,” she added. “People want to convey more and more emotion. The language of the future is a visually based language. It’s very universal and democratic.” Rosenthal estimated somewhere around 6 billion emojis and stickers are sent every day across devices and services. ___ EMOJIS AND THE YOUNGINS Clearly, emojis are the darlings of the Millennial and GenZ generations. Other age groups are in the game, but Tayfun Karadeniz said age isn’t the entire story. He’s the founder and head of EmojiXpress, a third-party app for iOS that supplies users with every emoji available in the Unicode Standard. He’s also a new voting member of the Unicode Consortium. Of roughly 50 million downloads of his app over the last three years, 80 percent of his users are female. Are they just about the fun? Are we, in the grand scheme, now dependent on emojis in some profound way? “I wouldn’t say our society would break down if we didn’t have them, but you could also ask why do we need art, why do we need TV shows?” Akash Nigam, the 23-year-old co-founder and chief executive of Blend, a group messaging app focused on Millennials and GenZers, thinks emoji use among those age groups has a slightly more urgent element. “They’re integral to their daily lives,” he said. “With this audience, it’s kind of like the punch line. Whoever uses the most unique emojis alongside a very witty text kind of gets the most kudos. Everybody is always pounding their keyboards looking for emojis that haven’t been used. I mean, yeah, you could paint a picture or write an essay, but it doesn’t feel the same.”