Last week, I was invited to the Christmas party of a Corby-based company called Sterling Rock. It is run by an 18-year-old called Carl Buckingham. Luckily for Carl, his party had an good turn out, as it was hosted in the Tower Hotel in central London rather than somewhere grim in Corby, and it had an open bar (always a bonus).

I know now what journalists meant when they described me as a "sickeningly young" dot.com millionaire, because Carl is just that. For goodness sake, he was about 12½ when I first hit the headlines with "that Jewish website". Seeing him smooch with big players in the industry made me feel sick with envy.

The company he runs seems to have been formed only a few months ago, but the party's costs must have run to about £10,000, what with the three course meal (which was lovely), the free drinks afterparty at the Hard Rock Casino and with Carl putting his ten or so staff up in "plush suites".

When I asked one of his staff where the money came from I was told, "we'll it isn't sales". In the dot.com culture of the time, spending that amount on a party wouldn't have been unusual for an internet company in 2000. But we're almost in 2005 now, so it's a bit odd.

The company actually does something very similar to my QuickQuid.com site, where we offer users a percentage in cashback when they make purchases online and fixed amounts of cash for performing actions such as opening bank accounts. However, while we give money - real hard cash to our users - Carl's site, SweetCollect gives sweets. So you could get £12 when you apply for an American Express card with QuickQuid.com, or you could opt for Carl's site and get a tube of Smarties or something else worth a similar amount.

My initial reaction to SweetCollect was that it must be kids collecting sweets for filling out forms, but you can only sign up to the site if you are over 18. So why would adults use his site over others such as mine?

Maybe they're sweet addicts, too fat to drag themselves down to the bank, withdraw the money we would send them and go into Woolworth's and get a pretty massive Pick 'n Mix bag with our £12.

Lucky for Carl I guess, that Woolworths.co.uk doesn't offer sweets by mail order yet (although aquarterof.co.uk is a pretty good online alternative for those who want to order traditional sweets).

The eBay website has also been catching my attention recently with their ingenious treasure hunt promotion. Every hour they give away items ranging from cars to a state of the art home cinema system, but to win you have to follow clues to find a hidden eBay listings.

For example, on Friday they had the clue as "Turkey" with an hourly hint of "Veg Out". Would you believe that the hidden listing was for Range Rover parts? Well neither would I, but it was. Apparently from "Turkey" and "Veg Out", we should get vegetables at a traditional Christmas dinner, which include roast potatoes, but if you were clever (or sad, I'm not sure which), you would also know that there's a variety of potatoes called Ranger Russet, from which we should get Range Rover.

A search at the right time for "Range Rover" would have found the Range Rover parts hidden listing.

Unsure that anyone could have possibly got that link, I trawled the message boards on the eBay site and found that certain "eBayers" have devised a search string that displays all listings that have been added to the site within the last five minutes, they just keep refreshing their browser until a likely listing appears, click on it and then hey presto, some gadget or other is theirs.

So all the clues and deep research into potato types is actually pointless. It all becomes a case of fastest finger first, which may rule out the rather fat fingers of the sweet addicts at Carl's site.

Benjamin Cohen is the founder of the QuickQuid.com website. He will be writing an occasional diary for Times Online on life for a small businessman in the tech sector

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