Kiwiblog

Fairfax has announced that it is selling 30% to 35% of Trade Me, and will be listing it on the stock exchange through an initial public offering.

This is great news, and should result in a lot of keen investors.

I await Labour and The Greens insisting that as Trade Me is vital infrastructure due to its near monopoly status, that the Government buy it and turn it into an SOE.

An interesting new initiative from Labour. To have one of their MPs go onto the Trade Me message boards and diss your own social media campaign.

The Dom Post reports:

Wellington waterfront visitors will be able to connect to the internet for free from this morning with the launch of Trade Me’s wi-fi network.

Initially expected to cover the area south from Frank Kitts Lagoon to the waterfront side of Te Papa, it is likely to extend to areas including the Sunday markets.

Weather’s not great today, but hope to try it out at the weekend with an iPad at one of the fine bars on the waterfront.

Carmel Sepuloni on Red Alert blogged yesterday:

John Chapman is a staunch Labour supporter and is one of our good friends in Waitakere:)

Given his support for Labour and generous nature, he’s kindly put up one of his prints for sale on trademe – proceeds raised will go towards the Mana campaign.

The print is entitled ‘It’s only going to get worse’ – how appropriate given the state of our country under the current National Government.  We may have to persevere another year (or slightly less) of a National Government but that gentle reminder of how much worse it could get if we have to endure any longer than that – is a great motivator for getting Labour people and the generally ‘disillusioned with National’ ordinary kiwi, enthused about the next election!

Whale has this graphic:

Not a single person bid. No not one. How incredibly embarrassing.

I guess Carmel was right – it was only going to get worse – for Labour.

UPDATE: A reader commented to me  that they are surprised a certain Board of Trustees Chair didn’t bid for the artwork so it could then be burnt – or does that only happen when it is part of a Police investigation involving the PM?

An interesting auction on Trade Me. A chair made in the 19th century in Japan that was gifted to Sir Robert Muldoon by the Japanese Government.

Bidding is at $12,000.

Someone has listed this phone on Trade Me as a Telecom XT mobile phone

As always, the Q+A are quite hilarious.

Incredible. The bidding for the John Key flag doodle has reached $19,238. Now I suspect the bidding is more for the morning tea with John (and Pippa) than the artwork itself – I certainly hope so!

As at 6 am:

• Top Bid $19,238
• 188 bids
• Approx 250 questions and answers – many of these are hilarious. Well done to the TVNZ staffer answering them.
• 73,622 page views

The Cure Kids charity will be pleased, especially with five days left in the auction.

A friend e-mailed this to me. I have excised the name of the poor seller!

Oh this is very very funny.

Artist Sam Mahon has created this sculpture of Nick Smith. He has made it from cow manure and it is up for auction on Trade Me. It is called “Nick Smith in the shit” and is currently going for $560.

Mahon explains:

The sculpture is light and hollow and highly polished. It sits on a steel stand slightly right of centre.

I wonder how much it will go for. Will Nick bid? Will any of his colleagues bid? Is it made of organic manure only?

I previously blogged on how North Shore Mayor Andrew Williams black-listed Whale Oil from bidding in a charity auction, removing his bids. This meant the auction went for $150 (and to the Mayor’s daughter) instead of the $1,000 or so Whale was willing to bid.

They obviously realised what a bad and indefensible look this was, so today the Herald reports:

Mr Williams said council members and staff had boosted the top bid by $1030 and three teenage cancer patients would accompany him today in the jet plane simulator.

The poor Councillors and staff – having to do a whip around to save face for the Mayor.

A more sensible approach would have been to raise the money beforehand, and simply outbid Whale Oil.

Mr Slater said he would pay the $1000, which included money sent in by readers of his blog, “in the spirit of the auction”.

Great for the charity.

I blogged on Monday about how Whale Oil was seeking donations so he could win a charity auction (for Westpac Rescue Helicopter) for the prize of 90 minutes in a flight simulator with North Shore Mayor Andrew Williams. Cameron is a relentless critic of Williams, for those who don’t know.

Now this was great for the charity. It pushes up the value of the auction. Cameron was willing to go up to US$1,000 or NZ$1,500 – all of which would go to charity. He said if he was outbid he would donate the money regardless which meant if someone outbid him, the Westpac Rescue Helicopter could end up with more than NZ$3,000.

But in a fit of cowardice, Andrew Williams conspired with Trade Me to disallow bids from Cameron (and it seems from several other bidders), and the auction closed for just $150.

I’m disgusted at Trade Me that they remove valid bids, just because Andrew Williams did not like the bidder. That undermines their integrity greatly. And they helped rip the charity off also.

Williams looks ridiculous also. If Slater had won, Williams could have turned it into great PR – look at what I’m prepared to do for charity. Or if he really could not face the possibility, he should have got somone to outbid Cameron.

Now as it happens the Mayor’s daughter won the auction it seems at $150. And this was after several bids for higher than that were removed. So it looks even worse that they appear to have fixed who would win.

Aaron Bhatnagar blogs:

Slater would be a legitimate bidder, though clearly not one Williams would have appreciated. However, it was for a charity, so there ought to have been an element of goodwill about this. It’s not at all uncommon charity auctions have elements of prank or comical outcomes, but because it’s for charity, you tend to take it all in good humour. After all, Rodney Hide allowed himself to get his head shaved by Williams for charity not long ago.

Which makes the actions hypocritical also.

UPDATE: A reader has commented that the person listing an auction can blacklist or remove bids themselves, without any input from Trade Me. If this is correct, then Trade Me are not to blame. The villain then is Worldflight who acted with Williams to lower the amount donated to charity. There goes the brand.

A four year old son found this in the garden. Thanks to Trade Me, you can now bid to own this grapefruit, which looks remarkably like a turnip from Blackadder!

The Q&A is already off to a good start with questions over size!

This arm cast won’t go for $18,000, but it is also for a good cause – Rotorua Hospice, and signed by the local MP.

The Herald reports on the winning bid of $18,500 for the John Key cast. It seems the wife was not initially that keen!

The winner is a Ganesh Cherian, whose business is making memorial headstones – I guess one business with continual demand

Just a reminder that people can donate directly to the Fred Hollows Foundation here. The amazing thing with the Foundation is that they can do so much for so little.

The John Key cast and morning tea auction hit an amazing $20,000 at 1 am this morning.

There have been 202 bids and what has amazed me is how many different people are bidding, even after it hit $10,000.  This suggests to me it may get quite busy in the last few hours on Sunday.

The number of questions on the auction are in the hundreds and there have been almost 100,000 page views of it. I feel sorry for John’s staff who were up until midnight doing responses to questions.

Incidentally if you want want to support the good work done by the Fred Hollows Foundation but $20,000 is out of your price range, you can donate directly to them here.

Some puerile sorts have got all excited I understand with my trade history on Trade Me, and a contact tells me have started e-mailing it about.

How pathethic.

I know one’s Trade Me history is public, if people know your username and my one is no surprise – I’ve even linked to my feedback page for those who can’t guess it. If people get excited that *six* years ago I purchased some FHM magazines, then it says a lot about them.

Wow the Trade Me auction for John Key’s arm cast is now at $10,200.  What I find interesting is the number of people bidding. It’s not just two people fighting each other for the winning bid – each of the last ten bids is from a different person.

There have been 112 bids so far, and 41,645 page views. The Q&A, as usual, is quite amusing. Some extracts:

Can we get picked up in Winston’s (hopefully) soon to be returned government vehicle?

Sorry, no.

Will John swap it for a Holden Ute? Or a slightly-used socialist party?

No.

does the arm come with it?

No.

who is paying for the morning tea. John personally or me the taxpayer.

The morning tea will be John’s personal shout.

Would John have a left arm cast made so there is a matching pair?

John has said he hopes this to be a one-off event.

If I was successful with this auction do I also have ownership and rights to any genetic material that may left inside the cast and the right to clone if I choose to?

You may have to negotiate with John’s lawyers for that particular right.

Still five days to go.

Bidding for the cast, with a week to go, has already broken the $3,000 mark after settling at $1,300 overnight.

Great to see so many people willing to donate to charity.

Some of the questions to date have been amusing, such as whether one can use Winston’s car to pick the cast up.

The PM’s Office have placed an auction on Trade Me for John Key’s broken arm cast. It has been signed by John, Kevin Rudd and most of the Pacific premiers.

The money from the winning bid will go to The Fred Hollows Foundation NZ, which operates blindness prevention programmes in the Pacific. There are an estimated 5,000 blind people in the Solomon Islands, mainly needing cataract surgery.

The winner will also get to have morning tea with the Prime Minister.

On Trade Me a letter from Muldoon is being auctioned, and the reserve is one million.

Closes in an hour. Get in quick

A Venturer Scout Unit think so. They have made a picture of Helen from 79.5 pieces of toast and are auctioning it on Trade Me!

I blogged on Wednesday how someone was selling their soul on Trade Me. Several people suggested it was Mr Bolger, but it was a Walter Scott from Wanganui. Trade Me took down the auction, but Hell Pizza have put out this PR:

Following an auction for Wanganui man Walter Scott’s soul on internet auction site Trademe, HELL Pizza have offered Mr. Scott $5001.00 in return for his soul, which he has duly accepted.

Scott decided to sell his soul because he felt it was of little use to him; however the auction was pulled down late this morning after it received a staggering 32,000 hits and over 100 bids. Bidding was at $5000 before the auction was taken down.

HELL, who had been following the auction, after seeing it on local television, felt sorry for Scott and decided they should find a home for his soul. HELL tracked Scott down and offered him $5001 for his soul.

“The soul belongs to HELL; there is simply no better place for it! We always strive to embrace the very personality that has made us loved by so many pizza eaters, and this is great. The idea of selling your soul fits well with our brand. It’s what we’re all about,” says Rachael Allison, Head of Marketing HELL Pizza.

HELL will hand over $5001 to Scott in Wanganui tomorrow. In return Scott will give HELL a contract outlining details of the ownership and a signed certificate.

“If a person’s game enough to sell their soul then it deserves a good home,” says Allison.

Heh. I hope it makes TV.

Someone is selling their soul on Trade Me

The Muldoon toby mug which I temporarily possessed after helping my team win a Muldoon era quiz night, is up for auction on Trade Me by its owner.

This is a great item. I have never seen another like it. It would look especially good in a National MP’s office, but also would be a guaranteed talking point on any mantlepiece.

A smart National electorate chair would buy it, and then re-auction it at the annual conference!

Superb. The Trade Me auction of honorary consulships, done by Whale Oil, has gained its own dedicated editorial in the Dominion Post. Some extracts:

Alas, the online auction for an honorary consulship has been revealed to be the work of an inventive blogger rather than a Foreign Affairs and Trade Ministry initiative, The Dominion Post says.

The bidders who offered half a million dollars, Holden utes and assignations with supermodels in exchange for the position will instead have to earn the good opinion of Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters if they wish to add the title honorary consul to their letterheads. The auction was pulled by Trade Me after receiving “a number of complaints” and because the seller was unable to deliver the item listed.

But this is an idea whose time has come. And it is one that should be applied to a wider range of positions than just honorary consulships. Instead of assigning plum diplomatic posts to politicians who fancy a spot of OE before heading off to tend the flower beds and write indignant letters to the local newspaper, they should be auctioned off to the highest bidder. Surplus cabinet positions should also be put under the hammer. Everybody knows there is barely enough work for 15 ministers. The remaining ones should be flogged off, and so should national honours …

But a formal auction would be manifestly superior. Not only would it widen the pool of bidders and direct funds to the consolidated account rather than party coffers, it would also avoid the sort of confusion that now hovers over the most recent Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, expatriate billionaire Owen Glenn. Did he get the honour because he gave $7.5 million to Auckland University’s new business school or because he gave the Labour Party $500,000 and loaned it a further $100,000?

An auction would also avoid the speculation that now surrounds Mr Glenn’s interest in being appointed honorary consul to Monaco. Was he responsible for the large anonymous donation NZ First president Dail Jones says appeared in the party’s bank account late last year but that Mr Peters says was never made? He’s not saying. In an open, transparent system there would be no need for confusion or obfuscation. Bidders could make known their identities and would receive the heartfelt thanks of the populace, spared the cost of footing at least part of the Government’s bill.

Let the bidding commence.

The only way this story can get better is if Winston now goes ahead and actually appoints Glenn.