Companies deploying a mobile workforce might well be grateful for the concept of Yoggie’s mobile security on a stick. The idea is that by using one of the company’s security plug-ins, which looks like a memory stick and comes in flavours both for the Mac and for the PC, you get around the need for firewall, anti-virus and other functions on your computer.

The advantage is clear; people with older computers might find that something like Norton’s software is a little memory-intense and slows their system down. The problem is that at this stage so does the Yoggie.

I first installed it on my wife’s new laptop – not massively powerful but a matter of weeks old. It installed perfectly, although the fact that Windows warned that the configuration site didn’t have the right certificates in place was less than reassuring. It did the job of anti-virus and other protection like anti-phishing – then it turned around and bit us by deciding not to download video from BBC iPlayer and claiming this was due to the Internet provider (strangely it sprung back to life when we’d taken the Yoggie software off, so it wasn’t the ISP whatever Yoggie says).

Meanwhile I put the Mac version on my year-old iMac and was surprised when on restarting the system didn’t seem able to see it. That was it really – I unplugged it and once again, the system just didn’t know it had the stick attached.

All of which is a pity. The notion of attaching an external stick to a computer and taking the computing overhead for security away from the basic system would extend the life of a laptop or desktop, and in straitened times we could all do with a few more miles out of whatever devices we own. As a concept it’s brilliant; hopefully I’ll be able to report sometime that the phase 2 implementation matches the idea with the execution.