Facebook, Microsoft, Apple...Oman?

This story first aired in January, 2016.

You never know where a story might lead you or what questions it may leave unanswered. Take for example a story we did in January about a campaign to make the dumpling emoji a reality. Jennifer 8. Lee told us that emojis have to be approved by something called the Unicode Consortium. They're the group that creates the standards that enable people around the world to use computers in any language. She mentioned their membership includes not just tech companies like Apple, Google and Facebook -- but countries, such Oman.

And that made us wonder what this one Middle Eastern country was doing there with all of those tech giants! That led us to Thomas Milo, a pioneer of computer typography and encoding. He's a partner with DecoType in the Netherlands, a company that's long been working with Arabic script technology. He also happens to be Oman's primary representative at the Unicode Consortium.