We were recently told about a new product one of our colleagues found called CyberClean. - a gel that has the look and what I can only imagine the consistency of Slimer from Ghostbusters. Apparently it cleans hard to reach fiddly bits such as vents in your car or between the keys on your keyboard and is completely reusable and biodegradable. So being the clean freak I am I couldn't resist getting some and trying it out on my not so sparkly keys - especially for £2.80 a pot.

On delivery I pulled it out the tub and began smearing it across my keyboard much to the horror of my ICT neighbours. To my delight, and my panicking ICT comrade, it worked a treat! We got into a discussion of how they receive devices or computer components back from across the business that are filthy and can be very time consuming to clean. As a result they have bought some and trialing it with a couple of colleagues to see how effective it is.

This all seems really insignificant and not at all revolutionary but there is a point to the story. Although informal - the process which CyberClean went through is how we test all ideas in the lab (just in a small scale); Start with a problem of dirty keyboards, test something on the cheap and on a small scale, scale up the test to a wider audience, evaluate the results and decide on the outcome. All in the space of 2 days.