Episode 11 - Jeremy Burge
08 Apr 2016
"There's just something in my brain that rebels against being told what to do." - Jeremy Burge
Jeremy Burge is the creator of Emojipedia, an online encyclopedia of emojis. As of this recording the site has 12 million visitors per month and had six-figure revenues in 2015.
After running a web development agency for almost a decade, one day Jeremy decided to launch a website to catalogue and categorise emojis. He began posting about the new emojis included in the Unicode drafts until one day the site started to crash - it went from a few thousand visitors to hundreds of thousands overnight. As the site has grown Jeremy has also been responsible for the creation of World Emoji Day, which is now celebrated every July 17th by people and brands around the world. To acknowledge his role in the emoji field Jeremy was invited last year to join the Emoji subcommittee of the Unicode consortium.
We talk about emoji (obviously!), the future of online communication, arranging your life to a schedule that works for you, the different ways to read, the benefits of having a small team and much more.
Huge thanks again to the guys at Omny Studio for letting me use their recording studio to do this episode.
Selected Resources and Links
- Find out everything you wanted to know about emoji at Emojipedia.org
- Jeremy's TV appearance on The Project
- Read more about Jeremy and Emojipedia in this Business Insider article
- Check out Emojipedia's explanation of the emoji in Snapchat
- The emoji that Jeremy best identifies with: Upside-Down Face
- Thinking Face emoji
- World Emoji Day - July 17
- An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth by Chris Hadfield
- DisneyWar by James B. Stewart
- Startup.com Documentary
- Best of Byrd fansite built by Jeremy about the bailiff on Judge Judy
- Connect with Jeremy on Twitter