Emoji are pictographs (pictorial symbols) that are typically presented in a colorful form and used inline in text. They represent things such as faces, weather, vehicles and buildings, food and drink, animals and plants, or icons that represent emotions, feelings, or activities. To the computer, they are simply another character, but people send each other billions of emoji everyday to express love, thanks, congratulations, or any number of a growing set of ideas.

The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit organization based in Mountain View, California. It was incorporated in 1991 by Mark Davis, Joe Becker and Lee Collins. Mark Davis has been president of the Unicode Consortium since the consortium was incorporated. Its primary purpose is to maintain and publish the Unicode Standard which was developed with the intention of replacing existing character encoding schemes which are limited in size and scope, and are incompatible with multilingual environments.

The Unicode Consortium solicits proposals from the public for which new emoji should be considered for inclusion in the standard. The Unicode Emoji Subcommittee regularly reviews proposals for new emoji. The selection criteria in essence are:

a) will the image work at the small size at which emoji are commonly used,

b) does the emoji add to what can be said using emoji or can the idea be expressed using existing emoji,

c) is there substantial evidence that a large number of people will likely use this new emoji.

More Info: home.unicode.org