Meg Whitman, president and CEO of eBay, will deliver a keynote presentation at the COMDEX trade show today at 12 noon in Las Vegas. She will give an overview of eBay's history and opportunities going into the future. Among the areas she'll cover are international, end-to-end services (making the transaction easier) and domestic market opportunities. Whitman will also discuss the commerce potential for the Internet despite current market conditions and the dot.com downturn of the past year. Webcasts of the COMDEX keynote series will be broadcast from zdnet.comdex.com.

eBay recently entered into an agreement with Key3Media Group, the COMDEX conference producer. eBay will have kiosk stations throughout COMDEX, where eBay staff will be available to provide information and answer questions about buying and selling IT-related items on eBay. According to eBay, the amount of gross merchandise sales in the computers/IT and consumer electronics categories on eBay since 2000 has increased by 70%, and is at a current run-rate of $1.4 billion in gross merchandise sales for 2001. Each day there are more than 400,000 item listings in these categories. Computers/IT and electronics sellers on eBay are mainly small merchants and individuals, joined by a growing list of major brand sellers including IBM, Palm, Iomega, Dell Financial Services, Sun Microsystems, ViewSonic, Xerox, D-Link, Ritz Camera and others.