Geldof angry; eBay scraps Live8 ticket sales

LONDON (AFP) - The Internet auction site eBay bowed to pressure and stopped selling tickets for the London Live8 concert to increase awareness of African poverty due to be held on July 2.

More than two million mobile phone text messages were sent in a lottery to win the 150,000 free tickets to the show, starring Paul McCartney, Elton John and REM, among others.

But no sooner had the first tickets been allocated than some began appearing Tuesday for sale on eBay.

Irish pop star-turned aid activist Bob Geldof, who is organising the event, described the sales as "sick" and threatened to launch a court case to force eBay to end them.

Geldof told Tuesday's Daily Mirror newspaper that he was furious at eBay for allowing the sales, labelling the firm "an electronic pimp".

eBay to Buy Shopping.com for $620 million

San Francisco (InfoWorld) - eBay continued its acquisition spree by agreeing to buy comparison shopping site Shopping.com for about $620 million in cash. The move should benefit eBay's sellers by giving them access to a new sales channel and a new set of buyers, while Shopping.com will be improved by the addition of eBay's listings on its site. eBay had annual revenue of $3.3 billion in 2004, and net income of $778.2 million. In the same year Shopping.com made $99 million in revenue and net income of $12.2 million. But Shopping.com has been adding customers at a faster clip, according to research company comScore Media Metrix. It attracted 22.6 million unique visitors in April, up 15 percent from the same month a year earlier, compared with 63.8 million for eBay, an increase of 6 percent over the same period. In December eBay agreed to buy property listings site Rent.com for $415 million, and a month before that it bought Holland's top classifieds site, Marktplaats.nl, for $290 million. Earlier last year it acquired a 25-percent stake in Craigslist of San Francisco, beefing up its classifieds business.