Simple and good ideas, good promotion and a little bit of luck are the ingredients that always pay off when it comes to making money on the internet. A Romanian student steered the interest of the Yahoo! staff after conceiving a series of emoticons for the worldwide famous Yahoo! Messenger service called “emoticoncert”.

What are emoticons?

Emoticons were invented in 1982, to be precise on the 19th of September, by Scott Fahlman. In the late 1990’s Yahoo! Started using emoticons for the Yahoo! Messenger service. Emoticons evolved and gradually replaced words that could not fully express one’s feelings or mood with smiley or sad faces. Their purpose is to avoid misunderstandings due to the lack of contextual information and lately it has been developed whole soft industry that produces emoticons. The word “emoticon” is a blend of “emotion” and “icon”.

Darius’s Idea

At the moment Darius Groza is studying at Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania. He came up with the this idea last summer when his girl friend sent him “Mad World”, a well known song, on Yahoo! Messenger. The lines which sparked his imagination - “I find it kind of funny/ I find it kind of sad” - inspired him to associate each line of the song with al least two emoticons available on Yahoo! Messenger. Then his friends became a kind of “lab mice” as he asked them to play the track on their PC’s while Darius copied and posted them in his Messenger window. In November 2006 he video taped everything and uploaded the film on www.youtube.com. Three months later 4,000 people have already seen the short film. It took him only a couple of days to finish his work. Meanwhile he released Emoticoncert 2 and 3 “The World is New” and “Mistaken” which were a great success on youtube.

Yahoo! representatives e-mailed Darius

After repeatedly being posted on Romanian and foreign blogs Darius decided to post the link and a shot review on the Yahoo! Messenger blog. The next day ha was very surprised at seeing that his post had been paid attention by Sarah Bacon, Product Manager at Yahoo! Messenger. “Hello Darius, it’s extraordinary. Very clever.” His girlfriend’s ID was added by 85 people to their personal Yahoo! Messenger list. Some of those who sent her messages did it just for fun but others had serious intentions. One of them Jeff Bonforte, who is in charge with Yahoo! Messenger with voice, contacted Darius’ girlfriend on Messenger. Darius got his personal e-mail address and personally wrote to him. When asked how he could prove his identity and support his claim of working for Yahoo! Bonforte told Darius to search his name on the internet. The young student found that Bonforte was indeed an employee of the well known web site.

Working for Yahoo!

Yahoo! made an offer for buying the film posted by Darius on youtube. The company expressed its intention to use it for advertising the Yahoo! Messenger on the web. Darius proposed Bonforte to use his film for developing a concept for Yahoo! users – the “emoticonference”. Basically it is about playing a track on your internet connected PC while chatting on Yahoo! Messenger and sending emoticons at the same time.

The future will decide whether Darius Groza’s vision is right or nor. Anyway in Romania media’s attention was captured by his approach to emoticons and music on the internet.