How loud is the roar of the crowd when the Gators score a touchdown?
What about the screams of crazed fans at the Dave Matthews Band concert?
Up the Volume is one of the iPhone’s latest applications and it’s the only “excitement” meter that enables users to measure noise levels.
It is also the first app released by one of Gainesville’s newest businesses, Maito Interactive LLC.
“If you’re at a house party, and everyone’s going crazy over some song, take a picture of your friends, measure the volume level and put it on Facebook,” said Anthony Albritton, co-founder of Maito Interactive.
Albritton said the readings from the app allow people to have fun sharing ratings with friends.
“It’s just a fun app to have. It allows you to get anything you’re excited about to Facebook and your friends,” he said.
Up the Volume was just released Saturday at the iPhone App Store, and it is available for a promotional two-week period for free.
Albritton said a version for Android will be released soon.
The app estimates the decibel reading from how much noise the microphone detects and converts it into a rating of 0 to 100, he said.
It features playful animations and phrases that correspond to the various noise levels.
A Facebook button enables users to link the rating directly to their account and post it to their wall.
There is also a camera link that allows users to take a photo without leaving the app, save the photo to the camera and return to re-measure the excitement level, he said.
Albritton, a UF alumnus and entrepreneurship master’s student, joined forces with two of his friends in September of last year.
After much discussion and work, they officially opened Maito Interactive in November.
Jeremy Fowers, co-founder and a doctoral student in electrical engineering at UF, said he and his colleagues have similar mindsets concerning their ideas but different creative tendencies, which ultimately creates more well-rounded products.
“A lot of developers are just looking to make a quick buck with flashlight and fart apps, but we’re actually trying to make a difference,” he said. “We want people to come together to experience the world with their friends.”
Avi Leavitt, co-founder and a computer engineering senior at UF, said Up the Volume is the stepping stone app for the company, created before they established their mission.
He said their future apps will uphold the values of their mission and introduce to society a new way of using technology — to build communities.
“Other companies create applications just for personal entertainment,” he said. “We want to reverse the trend of being entertained by devices instead of the people around us.”
