Names: Susan Kang and Joyce Kim

Website: Soompi.com, an online community for anyone who loves Korean music and entertainment

Location: Irvine and San Francisco, Calif.

Oftentimes, the most successful online communities stem not from strategic market research and dizzying analytical charts, but from a personal, unyielding passion.

For Susan Kang, that passion was for Korean pop stars like H.O.T., Shinhwa and 1TYM.

In 1998, the recent college grad created a website called Soompi Town, an unglamorous, yet heartfelt tribute to her beloved Korean crooners. She’d translate Korean magazine articles, scan photos from CD insets and upload the latest hits on RealAudio. Through the wonders of Photoshop, she even constructed “houses” for her favorite celebs and had them make just-for-fun shout-outs to her friends like “Eun Ji Won says ‘hi’ to his favorite noona, Jenny.”

“Man, I’m feeling really embarrassed now,” Kang says of her “super ghetto” K-pop shrine.

Of course, there’s really nothing to be embarrassed about. Ten years later, with a longtime tagline “K-pop for the masses,” Soompi.com is the largest Asian American online community in the world, serving more than 700,000 monthly visitors around the globe.

Her passion has morphed into a movement.

To think, it all started with a simple need. “I just noticed there was nothing out there in English for people who liked Korean music,” says Kang, now a 33-year-old mom who lives in Irvine, Calif. Her youthful fanaticism for K-pop has fizzled, naturally, but as the president of this fast-growing internet community, she’s developed a new love for making sure the “kids,” all 300,000 registered members, have a fun, safe place to call their own.

Today’s K-pop fans can read about Chae Tae-Hyeon’s new movie Speedy Scandal, check out a review of the drama I Am Saem, or join the fan club for actress Han Ye Seul. They can upload photos and videos, show off their skills (Soompi has held contests for singing, dancing and graphic art), engulf themselves in Fanfics (member-written novels where K-pop stars are the main characters), play online games or simply connect with those who share the same interests. The site gets about 12,000 user-generated postings a day, which are moderated by a team of volunteers.

For Kang, it hasn’t been easy keeping up with Soompi’s rapid growth. Server costs were one thing. “What started as a free site moved up to a $10 a month site to a $30 a month site to a $100 a month site and just kept on building,” she recalls. “Everything always came out of my own pocket.”

Then came what Kang refers to as the “Great Crash of ‘05,” when Soompi suddenly lost all of its databases, member information and forum posts. It was a technical nightmare that put Kang at a crossroads: “I wondered, is it worth it [to keep it going]? I wasn’t even really into Korean pop anymore. I thought about giving it up. But then I would read all these posts on the site saying, ‘Oh my God, I can’t live without Soompi. I’ve met so many friends here. This is my community.’ When I read stuff like that, I’m like, oh man. I feel an obligation to keep providing.” Once the site was back up, 40,000 members signed up again within the first four days.

In 2006, Kang connected with Joyce Kim, a Silicon Valley-based attorney for technology start-up companies and venture capital funds. (She is also the sister of Jared Kim, whose story is on page 58.) Kim signed on as the CEO of the company, helping monetize the site through advertising and sponsorships.

Kang, who works as a web developer by day, says her dream is to manage Soompi full-time. It’s become a thriving community for all. “You don’t have to be Korean. You don’t have to be Korean American. You just have to love Korean pop.”

Name: Ben Huh
Website: ICanHasCheezburger.com
Location: Seattle

There’s no use in padding his job description: Ben Huh posts cat pictures on the internet. Or more accurately, he gets other people to post cat pictures on the internet.

Why would someone with a journalism degree from Northwestern spend his days running a cat photo blog?

Simple.

No. 1: It makes people happy.

No. 2: It’s a commercial dream.

The site is I Can Has Cheezburger and it’s a cultural phenomenon that has fans of all ages submitting “lolz,” digital photos of funny cats (“lolcats”) with funny captions. Users type in “lolspeak,” a grammatically-incorrect, baby-talk-like “Engrish” dialect. (For the uninitiated, LOL is the web abbreviation for “laughing out loud.”)

“It seems kind of strange when you describe it in words,” says Huh, the CEO of the Seattle-based company Pet Holdings Inc., a network of eight websites anchored by ICHC.

Ben Huh, pictured here with wife Emily, heads a kitty empire with cult-site ICanHasCheezburger.com

Indeed. But perhaps the numbers speak more clearly.

“Let’s see,” he says, pulling up the latest statistics on his computer. “Yesterday was a pretty good day. We did 4.9 million page views across the entire network. I Can Has Cheezburger did 1.8 million, or something like that.” That’s a lot of laughter.

A little more than a year ago, Huh, 30, purchased the site from its founders, Hawaii-based Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami. Shortly after ICHC launched in early 2007, the pair was drowning in submissions, and could barely maintain the work flow. Huh came to the rescue. “I thought it made for a good entertainment site and it had a very, very good community around it,” says the Korea-born entrepreneur who had immersed himself in startups during the dot-com days.

Currently, his other sites — all acquired and all sort of weird — include TotallyLooksLike.com, which compares celebrity faces to other people and non-humans (example: “John Kerry Totally Looks Like Guy Smiley from Sesame Street”), Failblog.org, which features user-submitted pictures and videos of people “failing at life,” and IHasAHotDog.com, the ICHC equivalent for canines.

For the record, Huh says, none of his own lolz have ever made the homepage, which has a lineup that’s decided solely by user votes.

Also for the record, Huh is allergic to cats.

“There’s not enough irony in the world,” says Huh, who lives with his wife Emily and dog Nemo. “But I really like cats. This is my way of living vicariously.”

As CEO, Huh spends his days managing 15 employees, doing press interviews, serving on tech panels while wearing his infamous cheezburger hat, and “filling in the cracks.” “Every day is different from the next, but the common theme is that we want to grow and we want to continue to be profitable,” he says. Which isn’t always easy. The ads that the company relies on have recently been hit by the slowing economy.

For Huh, the effort has been worth it.

See No. 1.

“For the vast majority of people, it’s five minutes of happiness,” Huh says. “It’s five minutes of their day they can spend forgetting life’s troubles. My job is to figure out how to make more people laugh for longer periods of time. It’s nothing noble, but it certainly makes me take pride in what I do.”

Name: Jared Kim

Website: WeGame.com, an online community that provides the tools for gamers to share screencasts of their favorite in-game moments

Location: San Francisco

Gamers, you know the feeling. You’re in the middle of an attack and, suddenly, you click into intense concentration. But this time, unlike the dozens, maybe hundreds, of other times you’ve tried unsuccessfully, it finally happens: In a perfect culmination of timing and strategy, you master the unthinkable — you slay the vile rabbits in World of Warcraft, you defeat the jet-flying terrorists in Call of Duty 4, you pull off a legendary triple kill in Halo 3. Your heart races and you let out a victorious “Yesssss!” Win.

Then you look around and realize there’s no one to share the moment with.

These lonely episodes were what prompted Jared Kim to launch WeGame.com, a site that allows players to capture “screencasts” of their proudest video game segments and showcase them for public viewing. Often called the “YouTube for gamers,” the online community boasts 1.5 million monthly users.

“Growing up playing video games, there were always times when I’d do something and think, ‘Oh my God, that was so cool,’ and then I’d try to explain it to friends and a) they wouldn’t understand because it would be too intricate to describe in words, or b) they just wouldn’t believe me,” recalls Kim, who started the San Francisco-based company last year at age 19. “With WeGame, there’s an educational aspect because you want to show people how things are done, but also, just as a guy, it’s about bragging rights, like, ‘Oh yeah, I did this.’”

For Kim, a Los Angeles native, business was on the brain starting at an early age, when his parents sent him to live in China right after middle school. They predicted the country’s command in the world economy and decided he might as well learn Mandarin.

At age 16, with some seed money from his folks, Kim started his first company called Xinjun Software, an online gaming platform. With 70 employees under his lead, the kid CEO was immersed in the fierce world of entrepreneurship. “It’s a roller coaster,” says Kim, of running a startup. “You’re going to experience the lowest lows and the highest highs. That constant change is really exciting for me. The last thing I wanted was a life where every day was a repeat.”

After 11 months with the company, Kim sold it so he could head off to college. As a freshman at the University of California, Berkeley, he launched his second startup, Yaqqer, a social networking service that connected college students through their cell phones. But he gave up on it just a few months in, citing that “the mobile market just wasn’t ready.”

The idea for WeGame grew out of a personal need. He wanted to show friends his gaming strategies, but when he looked for ways to do this, he found that there were no simple — or cheap — options. Recording programs hogged system resources, slowing the games down. They also wouldn’t output compressed, upload-ready files. And converting and resizing video clips was a major pain.

Kim knew there had to be a better way. He did some market research — mainly asking fellow gamers what they would think about a service that would let them record their in-game action — and found that the response was overwhelmingly positive.

“The more I thought about it, the more crazy I became about it,” he says. “Eventually, it was just, ‘I gotta do this now.’”

He rounded up investors who believed in his mission and raised $3.5 million in financing, a feat that was reported on several major tech blogs. He says his age was never an obstacle; if anything, the fact that he’s part of his own target market has given him an advantage.

WeGame offers a free desktop client that captures screencasts within PC-based games and outputs them to files that can be uploaded quickly to the web. Kim programmed the initial version in his dorm room.

Before finishing his freshman year, Kim dropped out of school to work full-time on the company. His parents were disappointed at first, but the news didn’t completely surprise them and they soon became major supporters.

Today, Kim, now 20, manages 13 employees out of the WeGame headquarters in San Francisco’s SoMa district, a hub for tech industry powerhouses such as Yelp, Twitter and Wired magazine. He generates revenue through advertising and sponsorships, and hopes to eventually sell the company to a large corporation.

“I’ve definitely felt overwhelmed, but that’s the job of a CEO of a startup,” he says. “But if you’ve done your job right, you’re supposed to be the situation where everything is growing really fast.”

What advice would he give to those hoping to start their own internet companies?

“Start,” he says.

In this business, there’s no wiser word.

Name: Mia Kim

Company: Popgadget.net, a women’s lifestyle and technology magazine

Location: Washington, D.C.

When Mia Kim would flip through technology magazines at her local bookstore, she’d be more than disappointed — she’d be disgusted. There were scantily clad models holding up digital video cameras and straddling Power Mac G5s. “It was bizarre and sexist,” she says. “People around me would think I was reading Maxim.”

The 38-year-old tech junkie didn’t understand why even though women use gadgets daily (Who isn’t addicted to their laptops and BlackBerries?), there weren’t any resources that welcomed the female market, aside from the occasional fashion mag featuring a pink rhinestone-encrusted cell. So in 2004, she decided to channel her geek-knowledge into the launch of Popgadget, an online lifestyle magazine that embraces technology as an essential part of women’s lives.

Each day, writers dish about the latest technological wonders— tiny stick-on LED lights, portable digital picture frames, solar-charged MP3 players, earrings that double as earplugs — in a way that’s accessible to the female user, yet far from watered down.

“Instead of only hearing about the specs, how small or fast something is, women want to know: What will this do for my life?” says Kim, who adds she’s currently testing enough devices and gadgets in her Washington, D.C. office to cause a blackout.

Kim grew up in Washington, D.C., then moved to New York for film school. After graduating, she became a statistical programmer, but didn’t love it, so went back to school to get a master’s in interactive communications. She eventually took on a job as the new media director of a global entertainment company, but felt stifled once again, so she started her own tech consulting company and laid down the groundwork for Popgadget. She’d scour the web for must-have innovations in areas such as health, fitness, beauty, fashion, home and entertainment, and then feature them with commentary on the site.

After about two weeks of its launch, Popgadget was written up in USA Today. Los Angeles Times described the site as “bringing together the style of dailycandy.com and the sensibility of Wired magazine.” Kim’s sister Hoyun Kim, a corporate lawyer, stepped in to help turn the site into a business.

Popgadget now has eight regular writers and gets about 50,000 to 75,000 visitors a day. Aside from its main feed, it offers a free weekly email with exclusive discounts and giveaways, comprehensive gift guides (heads up, holiday shoppers) and a feature that delivers tech news straight to readers’ PDAs. In 2005, Popgadget’s creative director Jenna Park, a mother of two, headed the launch of Babygadget.net, an offshoot magazine that features “contemporary finds for modern tots.”

Kim’s goal now is to build a community within Popgadget, where women can feel comfortable asking questions and sharing insight. A set of experts would be on hand to guide them. “When many women walk into Best Buy, they feel like they’re being talked down to,” she says. “It can be a hostile, intimidating environment. We want women to know that learning about technology can be fun.”

Popgadget is funded by ads, but maintaining the site continues to be a struggle. “We don’t have the big advertisers,” Kim says. “The idea of technology and women still doesn’t make sense to some people.”

With every click, tag and download, she’s helping change that.

Name: Peter Kim

Company: Interpolls (Interpolls.com), a provider of rich media advertising solutions

Location: Pasadena, Calif.

Who would win in a fight: Ben Hur or Russell Crowe’s Gladiator?

It was an outlandish question, but one that turned Peter Kim’s obscure startup company into an empire.

Once upon a time, back in the ‘90s, online advertisements were flat. They didn’t really do anything besides tell you to book your next vacation or click now for a free credit report. The results were unsurprisingly bleak. Most would get a visitor click rate of .001, hardly enough for companies to want to rush onto the bandwagon.

Kim, who specialized in marketing, knew there was a missing technology.

“To me, these ads were like outdoor billboards on a webpage,” says Kim, 36. “They didn’t take advantage of what the internet was all about. It’s the only media out there that’s interactive. Why wasn’t there interactive advertising?”

So he built a company that specialized in just that. Fast forward to today and Interpolls, launched in 1999, is behind the conception and coding of the world’s most highly visible rich media ads (ads that draw audience participation), which drive everyday web users to watch movies, to register for dating sites, to try a new laundry detergent — ultimately, to spend.

How? Through poll questions. You’ve probably seen them on the sidebars or headers of big-name sites like ESPN.com or MSN, and may have even answered a few. Some are factual, like the ad for Jim Beam: Which bourbon has been around for over 200 years? Others are personal, like the ad for T-Mobile: How would you feel if you were separated from your Sidekick? You click on your choice and the results pop up instantly, oftentimes with special promotions or sweepstakes.

Kim grew up in Mississippi and graduated from Tulane business school. He then headed west to Los Angeles to work in finance, first at a boutique firm and later for Smith Barney. He eventually served as the director of strategic planning for a Silicon Valley startup specializing in satellite technology, until it went under in 1997. He says that’s where he learned how not to run a startup and made the choice to do it better.

He moved back to L.A. and laid the foundation for Interpolls, gathering funding from angel investors and venture capitalists, and bringing in Hyo Lee, a programmer who built the advertising technology from scratch. It wasn’t until 2002 when Kim used a connection in the entertainment industry to cinch the company’s first client: Warner Bros. Home Video.

At the time, Universal’s megahit Gladiator was storming through theaters and Warner Bros.’ VP of technology and marketing wanted to use its popularity to market the restored Ben Hur DVD, which was being released by his studio.

So he had Interpolls create a poll question that asked people who would win in a fight, Ben Hur or the Gladiator. He placed the ad on the Warner Bros. homepage to see what would happen.

The servers went nuts. Kim reported that the ad was getting a 9 percent click rate, an advertising statistic unheard of at the time.

The company went on to produce rich media ads for other movie studios such as Dreamworks, Paramount and New Line. For the first Harry Potter film, they launched a worldwide scavenger hunt where a million kids went looking for owls on 120 different websites. For Sex and the City: The Movie, they created an ad that could be shared on blogs and social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. The ad was passed on from site to site an average of 10 times. They’ve done ads for video games, pharmaceuticals and cars.

Even in today’s economy, business hasn’t slowed. “People still watch movies, they still eat cereal, they still use soap,” says Kim, who reported that the company generated an estimated $10 million in revenue last year.

At Interpolls’ headquarters tucked away in Old Town Pasadena (though there are plans to move to downtown L.A.), Kim manages 65 employees. They’re focusing on developing new widget technology and making their way into the mobile market.

“What gets me excited is doing things that have never been done before,” Kim says.

WED's Links: Asian Ams grab Obama’s attention, Jenna Ushkowitz, SK's 1st Chemical Castration Pedophile; Uglydoll Makers http://t.co/w9gRr0sH

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I uploaded a @YouTube video http://t.co/NnQFpSdq SMTOWN World Tour - EXO, SHINEE, f(x) Performance P.2