Within 48 hours of its launch, South African developer team Appceptional's mobile application, Mobiraba, saw a sudden and significant spike, and grew to over 50 000 users within weeks.
MXit, SA's biggest mobile social network, last week announced it would invest in local talent by facilitating mobile application developers, providing them with a platform to make money from their creativity.
Cross-platform mobile development house Appceptional has made use of the platform that MXit CEO Alan Knott-Craig Jnr says aims to create “micro-entrepreneurs overnight” and, despite initial apprehension as to the launch of a game already available on Nokia and Android platforms, has seen significant growth.
Local flavour
Mobiraba is based on the internationally known abstract strategy board game Morabaraba. Dating back to about 3 000BC, the game is well-known today among SA's rural youth and is commonly known by the Zulu form of the name “umlabalaba”.
Appceptional's mobile version of the traditional game allows users across multiple platforms to play either against the computer, or other users.
Co-founder of Appceptional, David Vannucci, says the team expected a manageable, organic growth of new users when the app was launched earlier this year. “Within 48 hours our external Web traffic spiked so aggressively that we thought something must be broken.”
Vannucci says the sudden growth spike Mobiraba experienced and the ability to manage infrastructure despite it, “is testament to the power of the cloud”. Appceptional leveraged the Go2Cloud platform to manage a number of key elements that include the messaging relay for Mobiraba.
Go2Cloud director, Paul Slade, says the uptake of Mobiraba is “inspiring”, as it goes to show how a concept can grow into a successful product, given the right platform and exposure.
Vannucci says the launch of Mobiraba is “simply the beginning” for the local team of developers and designers. “We have had over 22 000 user requests for Mobiraba tournaments, which will be our next feature.”
He says there are a number of brands looking to sponsor and brand Mobiraba boards for the tournaments, “not surprising when you consider specific age groups and demographics are easily targeted and game play lasts over eight minutes on average”.
Share