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Ninety-nine per cent of the people in the room were scratching their head.”īlackstock is the co-founder of Bitmoji, the Snap-owned avatar app, which he describes as “the Kleenex of cartoons … if people see a cartoon representation of someone, even if we had nothing to do with it, they’ll call it a Bitmoji.” “I can remember being in a roomful of investors, in one of these pitch sessions six years ago and telling this roomful of people it was inevitable that everyone on the internet would have an avatar – and we’re going to make them. “We caught on to this a long time ago,” Blackstock says.
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The only strange thing is how long it took them to catch up. To Jacob “Ba” Blackstock, it’s not surprising that these tech titans have each landed on a similar idea about what’s missing from modern communication. Apple’s executive leadership on World Emoji Day Photograph: Ī couple of weeks earlier, an Android developer had discovered a test feature hidden in the Facebook app that introduced Avatars – cartoonish lookalikes that can be used “to communicate with your friends and express yourself across Facebook”.
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