How do you reach 50 000 people on MXiT?


Left to right, Mileta Postic, Sanja Postic,Lorenzo Boccetti, Warren Hodgkinson, David Vannucci, Megan Russell, Chris Kieser, Jurgen Meekel 

Based on the internationally known game, Morabaraba, the cleverly named Mobiraba allows users across multiple platforms to either play against the computer or better yet, against another user. The smart engineering behind Mobiraba means that users don’t even have to be on the same platform to compete against each other.



In a world of platform dedicated apps, Mobiraba reminds us of that “ubiquitine” dream that web developers once held in such high regard, the ability to surface a similar end user experience no matter what the users platform of choice. No small feat in today’s multi OS ecosystems.

Co-founder of Appceptional, David Vannucci was quietly apprehensive at the initial launch of Mobiraba on the MXiT platform. “Mobiraba was already available to users on Nokia and Android platforms and based on this history we were expecting a manageable organic growth of new users”. 

The Appceptional team could not have been more wrong. 

“We released Mobiraba to the MXiT eco system late on Tuesday the 3rd of January 2012. Within 48hrs our external web traffic spiked so aggressively that we thought something must be broken.” Vannucci commented.

Proof that the growth of registered users was anything but organic growth.

Investigation revealed that the while nothing was actually “broken” the number of Mobiraba games played via MXiT was simply astounding.

With a wry smile Vannucci now comfortably comments, “Growth like this is usually every businesses dream and every infrastructure managers nightmare. It is a true testament to the power of the Cloud that we were able to remain up and running by instantly scaling to meet the demand.”

Appceptional leverage the Go2Cloud platform to manage a number of key elements that included the messaging relay for Mobiraba. Go2Cloud’s elastic cloud hosting capability provides customers and partners with instantly scalable compute capability. In addition local data centers ensure low latency and avoid any complications with data ownership often associated with providers in other geographies.

Go2Cloud Director and co-founder, Paul Slade, said in response “The amazing uptake of Mobiraba is fantastic. Seeing our customers go from concept through to such a successful product launch really is inspiring. The Go2Cloud team feel privileged to play a small part in powering Appceptional’s success”.

Since scalability is obviously no longer a concern for Appceptional, the focus must turn to “What next?” a question the team are no doubt continually ask themselves.

Vannucci’s obviously considered answer is a swift one, “This is simply the beginning of our plans. We have had over 22 000 user requests for Mobiraba tournaments, which will be our next feature. Of interest to our team at the moment is the number of brands looking to sponsor and brand the Mobiraba boards for these tournaments. Not surprising when you consider specific age groups and demographics are easily targeted and game play lasts over 8 minutes on average. That beats any billboard on the side of the road.”

There is no doubt that Appceptional is a business to watch, and that Mobiraba is just one of the apps up the teams sleeve. While they seem to be onto a winning recipe, one could argue that the secret ingredient was their ability to avoid any disappointment for users despite the rapid unplanned growth. 

Perhaps there is substance to this “Cloud” buzz after all, or maybe it’s simply the instant scalability of Go2Cloud?