Chicago up for sale on eBay

What is a city council to do when faced with an arts and culture budget deficit? In the case of Chicago, it is turning to eBay to auction off city-related events and memorabilia. Among the items for sale, reports the New York Times, is the chance to pour green dye into the Chicago River to mark St Patrick's Day celebrations, bid for a walk-on role at the city's Goodman Theatre, take a behind the the scenes tours of the city zoo or buy a decommissioned city parking meter. The report says that the Chicago-based Playboy Enterprises and Opra Winfrey show have also agreed to join in, offering a vintage Playboy Bunny costume or the dinner party services of Oprah's chef. ...more

Optical discs face obsolescence

Research from Forrester predicts that online entertainment services will cut hard into revenues from physical media from 2005. 'On-demand services are the future of entertainment delivery. CDs, DVDs, and any other forms of physical media will become obsolete,' said Josh Bernoff, principal analyst at Forrester. ...more

Intel signs up to join Eclipse consortium

Intel has announced that it has become a supporting member of Eclipse, which is a consortium of software development tool vendors building an 'open platform' for integrating third-party tools. Developers optimising applications for the Pentium 4, Xeon or Itanium processors will be able to use plug-ins to integrate Intel compilers and the VTune Performance Analyzers into the Eclipse development environment. Eclipse describes itself as 'a kind of universal tool platform - an open extensible IDE for anything and nothing in particular'. ...more

Sharp puts your pics on TV

Sharp is introducing its AQUOS range of LCD TVs, which can be used to display pictures taken on a digital camera. The TVs feature a PC card slot with an adapter compatible with various memory cards. In August Sharp will introduce its wireless digital AV transmission system and the AQUOS range will be the first products to take advantage. ...more

Analyst backs Apple over iTunes sales figures

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster has backed Apple's denial that sales of iTunes downloads have slumped this year. In a note to investors Munster said that from January to September Apple sold 18.5 million tracks per week, an increase of 78 per cent on 2005. ...more