A Katikati man has invented a computer software application which could make Christmas shopping a lot easier.
The idea has attracted international interest.
In a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon, Paul Hunkin developed an application to automatically buy items on Trade Me.
The "bid bot" gets $1 a day to spend,
and searches Trade Me every evening for newly-listed items in its price range. It then picks the rarest item in the list to bid on and buy, and uses social networking website Twitter to "tweet" about what it bought.
The programme is set up with a one-in-three chance of making a purchase and can save what it does not spend.
In two weeks the software has purchased watch batteries, a USB cable, some collectable cards and rare stamps dating back to 1955.
"It's been quite amazing seeing it grow so quickly.
"I had no idea it would get this big," Mr Hunkin said.
Mr Hunkin, a PhD student studying computer sciences at Waikato University, developed the technology after viewing a comic on www.xkcd.com - the tech community's humour site.
"Trade Me recently released some stuff to make it possible... for people to make a computer programme that can replicate the things that humans can do.
"Then I stumbled across the comic and thought 'that's genius, I should do that'."
The bid bot allows a person to make automatic bids on Trade Me items when they're not physically sitting at a computer.
Since developing the software two weeks ago, "bid bot" has sparked media interest in Iran, Sweden, China and Russia.
"It's just gone crazy and there's been articles written about it all over the world.
"There's an article on the German equivalent of Stuff website," Mr Hunkin said.
Other articles have been printed in French and Italian on other technology websites.
"There's probably some money to be made from it if I was inclined, and I haven't ruled that out," he said.
Since launching the "bid bot", Mr Hunkin has had 190,000 visitors to his blog and his followers on Twitter have leapt to more than 4300.
"After I put it up I had 50 views by 6pm. The next morning when I checked again I had over 80,000."
