GARDEN CITY, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Innovative social media technology company Giga Entertainment Media (GEM) announced today that it is introducing OHMOJI, its universal video-messaging platform, in the first quarter of 2018. OHMOJI is a new app that allows users to express their emotions and opinions in the most creative and exciting ways possible. Emojis are used by 92 percent of the online population, with more than 6 billion emojis being sent every day. OHMOJI is a fun and innovative way to take the emoji experience to the next level.
GEM's OHMOJI app allows users to customize and personalize the emoji experience by isolating their facial expressions as moving images and combining them with animated branded stickers. OHMOJI has a GIF-maker built into it, allowing users to record their expressions for a wide range of emotions, such as “sad,” “happy,” “angry” or even “excited.”
OHMOJIs can be saved to the user’s gallery, added as a new keyboard and displayed on SELFEO, GEM’S go-to mobile app for users who want to share their thoughts on any topic visually, while immersing themselves in a multitude of websites, online videos, newscasts and more. OHMOJIs also can be posted on other social media apps and platforms, such as Snapchat, Facebook and Twitter.
The app serves as a hub for users to create their OHMOJIs for use on other platforms. The creation process is quite simple: record your facial expression into a GIF, choose an animated body to combine with it, and send it to your platform of choice. The app has a full library of bodies and stickers across a range of categories that users can choose from or save for later use. Users can even purchase branded OHMOJI packs to represent their favorite sports team or characters from an upcoming movie. This exciting feature can initiate collaboration between brands and GEM, further expanding the company's reach.
The OHMOJI app allows users to save their images to a keyboard organized into categories. The categories range from various emotions to a user’s most popular and recently used OHMOJIs. This allows users to share their emotions anywhere they choose with easy accessibility. In addition to recording facial expressions, OHMOJI allows users to choose from a wide range of animated branded bodies as well — from super heroes and celebrities to animals and athletes. This total package is the ultimate way for users to share their expressions and emotions.
OHMOJI can also be used with SELFEO and give users the ability to comment and react to an extensive library of original and popular videos. In SELFEO, users typically react to a source video in the background, with their emotions and reactions captured in a PiP (picture-in-picture) setting. OHMOJIs can be used in two different ways in SELFEO: as the star of the video by reacting to a source video or enhancing a PiP-based SELFEO by floating across the screen.
Patent Filed with U.S. Patent Office
"OHMOJI is positioned to be a popular feature for connecting the community of SELFEO users with each other to create fun and exciting new ways to socialize and communicate,” said Eddie Huey, GEM’s Chief Technology Officer. “Conventional emojis are predetermined and typically express a limited number of human emotions without any personalization. OHMOJI takes things several levels higher, allowing users to dynamically create a personalized multimedia experience based on their reactions in an interactable format for ubiquitous sharing across multiple platforms, applications, online sites and text messaging systems.”
The patent for the OHMOJI app was filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office in September.
“OHMOJI is the next logical step in the evolution of GEM and SELFEO and will add to —and benefit from — the current emoji craze,” added Huey. “In pre-market testing with Millennials, we found incredible interest in OHMOJI. Like SELFEO, we expect it to be widely downloaded and used by young people around the world.”
Emojis/GIFs Statistics
- 36% of Millennials ages 18-34 who use “visual expressions” such as emojis, GIFs and stickers say that those images better communicate their thoughts and feelings than words do.
- 1,400 out of 2,000 US adults said they used visuals in text messaging and 80% agree, saying that these images help people better understand the thoughts and feelings they are trying to communicate compared to words alone.
- When asked whether they are more comfortable expressing emotions through visuals than through phone conversations, 68% of Millennials agreed, compared to 37% of those over the age of 65.
- More than half of people of all ages said they use emojis and GIFs in messages to make people laugh, to lighten the mood and because they “make conversations more fun.”
- By mid-2015, half of all comments on Instagram included an emoji.
- 5 billion emojis are sent daily on Facebook messenger.
Branded Emojis/Stickers
- 6 billion emojis and stickers are sent a day - people love visually driven communication.
- There are currently over 250 branded emoji keyboards in the market - these are a new type of ad unit, measured by the number of peer-to-peer shares instead of clicks.
- The branded emojis and stickers sent in messaging between friends is the ultimate word of mouth vehicle to discover a new product, film or TV show.
- Keyboards are compatible with almost all messaging apps (that’s 2 billion users that can use a brand’s keyboard).
- Like television, print, web and social before it, messaging needs good creative, meaning-rich visuals that convey emotion. It's not enough to just have an emoji keyboard or a sticker pack in iMessage; your content has to have personality that lets users express themselves.
Forbes: GIF-Maker Closing in on SnapChat with 100 Million Daily Users
According to a recent article in Forbes, GIF-maker Giphy has surpassed 100 million daily active users, closing in on Snapchat, which reported 150 million daily users in September. Giphy serves more than one billion GIFs daily, and users watch more than two million hours of GIFs per day. Additionally, TruthHawk reports that users are “rewiring” their brains and extending the English language beyond the alphabet as we know it today.
According to TruthHawk, "Today, emojis are just as much a part of the alphabet as the letters A through Z are. It’s not just young people – older technology users are as likely, if not more so, to use emoji. Many sent messages are composed entirely in emoji, and they’re frequently used as an easy way to open or close a conversation.”
According to Huey, "GEM is the only company combining both personalized facial expressions with moving animated bodies of humans, animals and cartoon characters, mapped against videos, photos or images and digital whiteboards. OHMOJIs will also deploy across multiple social media apps, including SELFEO. OHMOJI is designed to keep people engaged and give them something more to talk about and keep coming back to the app. The use of GIFs will also extend the time users spend in the app, forming a powerful product mix and opening the door to a successful monetization strategy.
“In addition, users will be able to create a customized library of OHMOJIs as part of the free app experience and, in the near future, we have plans to offer exciting, customizable upgrades that will be available for users to purchase and advertisers to sponsor."
About Giga Entertainment Media
Giga Entertainment Media (GEM) is an innovative media and entertainment technology company dedicated to taking the ordinary mobile screen viewing experience and making it extraordinary. Finding content is easy. But at GEM, we know people watching content on their mobile devices want more. More interaction with friends. More integration with social media. More opportunities to multitask. And more is what we give them through our innovative, interactive multi-screen mobile applications, available for free on all current-generation Apple and Android mobile devices. GEM’s 21st century approach to mobile video content starts with its multi-screen, multitasking Viewer platform, and users wanting a deeper dive into the social viewing experience can immerse themselves with SELFEO. More ways to interact with content means more ways to engage with each other, and we have more exciting ideas on the way. At GEM, we’re just getting started.
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