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*I Can Has Cheezburger? co-founders Eric Nakagawa, left, and Kari Unebasami, center, pose with company CEO Ben Huh outside a pub called The Asgard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during Laughing Squid's pre-ROFLCon party.
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In Behind the Memes, Underwire introduces you to web celebs who have created some of the internet's biggest buzzes. The cewebrities profiled will be in attendance at ROFLCon, an event billed as "group dissection of internet culture." ROFLCon meets Friday and Saturday in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
It all started with a picture of a cat. In early 2007, after a bad day at work, Eric Nakagawa asked his friend Kari Unebasami to send him a photo of something cute to make him feel better. She sent over a few cat images, superimposed with phonetically spelled phrases, or LOLspeak, and the two knew they'd found their calling. They launched I Can Haz Cheezburger?, a site dedicated to the popular mashed-up images of animals.
Shortly after the site launched, the two became inundated with submissions, and could barely maintain the work flow. "I was considering just ending the site," said
Nakagawa. "It was too much work."
That's where Ben Huh came in: "I just couldn't let that happen," he said. Huh, who met Nakagawa and Unebasami last May after they linked to a story he wrote about the pet food recall, bought the site for an undisclosed sum about four months later. Now he's the CEO of I Can Haz Cheezburger?, a site that Huh estimates gets roughly 2 million pageviews and about 8,000 submissions daily.
Unebasami and Nakagawa are working on other projects related to the site and the LOLcat phenomenon, including tweaking the upcoming LOLcat book, due out this holiday season.
Until this weekend, Unebasami had always elected to remain anonymous, preferring to operate under the pseudonym Tofuburger. "We were getting all these threats from users at [forum] 4chan," she explained, referring to 4chan's attempts to claim the cat macro phenomenon. "I didn't know how seriously to take them. But I'm officially 'out' now, and ready to embrace everything."
__Names: __Eric Nakagawa, Kari Unebasami (Tofuburger), Ben Huh (Cheezburger)
Ages: 26, 26, 30
__Location: __Honolulu, Hawaii; Seattle, Washington
__Day job: __Working on all things I Can Haz Cheezburger?-related
__You know them from: LOLcat site __I Can Haz Cheezburger?
Memestruck over ROFLCon attendees:
Yunebasami: "Tron Guy!"
Ben Huh: Swedish musician Gunther
Nakagawa: "Leslie Hall.... I can't believe I didn't bring a gem sweater to wear!"
Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
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