Jonah Katz and Andrew Hamilton — both college juniors who were classmates and teammates at Orange High School in suburban Cleveland — will begin publicizing the launch of their Pump Content application in the Apple App store this week.
The app enables content creators to start and stop video recordings on their iPhones, iPads, iPods and other Apple technologies by double-clapping their hands. (The app currently is available only in iOS format.)
Pump Content, which also crops images and automatically deletes the claps on its videos, eliminates the need for a creator to run back and forth to manually start and stop their recordings, Katz said.
Katz and Hamilton are expecting their free app to open doors to revenues from software developers and companies that want to use PumpML's platform to make their own technologies more interactive.
"The business model is software-as-a-service," said Katz, a junior communications major at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
Katz, who is CEO of PumpML, and Hamilton, a junior computer science major at Cornell University who is the company's chief technology officer, launched an app more than a year ago that enabled users to record videos of their fitness workouts and post them on social media, Katz said.
But the app had limited utility.
"I started making my own workout content to post on our app," Katz said.
That's when he realized how time-consuming it was to run back and forth to his phone every time he wanted to start and stop a recording.
"Hey, we should build this feature where you can just double clap and it'll stop and start recording the video for you," Katz remembers telling co-founder and software expert Hamilton.
Building a system that can detect a double-clap in the midst of background noises was harder than expected, but the two used existing tools to create their machine learning models, which they launched about a year ago.
That's when they realized "that these existing tools wouldn't give us the levels of precision and accuracy we needed to really make this app viable," Katz said. "We had to build out our own technology from scratch."
In the meantime, the two have built an app waitlist of about 700 content creators and influencers who have more than 30 million followers, Katz said. PumpML also is pushing out the app to its waitlist this week, he said.
Katz and Hamilton also are talking with a few companies that might want to license their platform to generate their own sound-detection, machine-learning models.
"One of the companies we're talking to right now is looking to build software that detects gunshots," Katz said. That software could be used to trigger safety measures, such as lockdowns or lights out, to protect people in schools, businesses and government offices during mass shooting events, he said.
Another potential client wants to detect noises that indicate its machinery has broken down.
"Experienced workers know what to do when they hear those sounds," Katz said, "but newcomers don't."
PumpML's application programming interface could enable the company to quickly alert employees or managers to broken machines, reducing machine downtime, he said.
Katz and Hamilton have raised about $200,000 for their business, which currently is virtual now but will eventually be located in the Cleveland area, Katz said.
"We expect that our first revenue will come from enterprise applications," he said.
