Back in October 2011 we launched our first ever bi-annual innovations competition, VYING FOR VYRE.

Innovation at VYRE has always been a key driver in taking the company forward and exploring interesting avenues, the competition was created to help encourage the promotion of ideas from every member of the company.  

The competition aimed to encourage the deluge of talent to get involved at a deeper level of the business here at VYRE whilst helping the company offer the best services and features to our clients. In return, VYRE promised the winning team a portion of their working week to develop the idea with the intention of it going live.

The competition categories were:

Go Viral - ideas that enhance our presence in the market, whether it's getting VYRE's name out or achieving more software sales.

Make Something - think you have the next big feature to enhance one of our products? Or perhaps an idea about using them in different ways?

Play Together - have an idea about improving the working environment - or how we can work better together?

Change the Ratio - Whether it's something we all do everyday or something that takes a small number of us a long time to do, ideas that increase efficiency are all welcome.

The judging criteria was based on innovation, potential and return on investment and we are pleased to announce that NotiVYRE was the winning entry! The winning team consisted of three developers: Blanca Garcia, Gary Chisholm and Matt Roberts.

The winning team's idea is to offer clients real time push notifications built into Unify and On Brand - our software platforms. They recognised that an increasing acceptance that email is no longer deemed the appropriate tool for internal communications, with inboxes regularly becoming full; there are ways to more effectively manage such communication.

The team said, 

"The idea developed whilst we were working on developing the new On Brand module, Creative Workflow. The module is extremely slick in terms of state of the art features and user experience, but every time one of the team members made any changes or updates to our projects, lots of emails were going to and for resulting in the activity logs rapidly filling up. If this were left for even a day two, there would be information overload. We thought this could be done better and quicker, allowing for rapid response to occurrences the system in a very passive, un-obtrusive way.

We realised the potential for real time notifications would be an invaluable feature for clients, starting with push notifications for updates and approval requests."

NotiVYRE will deliver realtime push notifications within a users browser; updates and requests for actions such as approvals, deadlines, commenting on an asset, task allocation and any changes made to site will occur instantly, reducing the reliance on email.

We are eagerly anticipating the next steps of the VYING FOR VYRE project with the team working on their idea in March to bring this fantastic idea to fruition, offering our clients a valuable benefit to their daily work practices.

The next competition is due to start in April of this year.