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Online marketplace operator eBay Inc. reports its first-quarter results Wednesday. The following is a summary of key developments and analyst commentary related to the period.

OVERVIEW: During its first quarter, San Jose, Calif.-based eBay continued to weather the global economic downturn and acknowledged that its marketplace business - which it has been struggling to improve - has a way to go. The company also talked up its online payments business, PayPal, and predicted that business will double in size by 2011.

Speaking during a day of analyst briefings in March, Chief Executive John Donahoe and other executives laid out changes to eBay's marketplace business, including focusing more on the market for offseason or liquidation-ready items, refining onsite search capabilities and working even more on cultivating buyers' trust.

EBay also said it expects PayPal, which is its second-largest business, to process between $100 billion and $120 billion in annual payments by 2011. In 2008, the service, which has 70 million active user accounts, processed $60 billion in transactions.

BY THE NUMBERS: In January, eBay forecast first-quarter earnings of 21 cents to 23 cents per share - or 32 cents to 34 cents per share when excluding items. The company also predicted $1.80 billion to $2.05 billion in revenue.

At the time, this was well below what analysts polled by Thomson Reuters were anticipating. Now, however, they expect eBay to report first-quarter adjusted earnings of 33 cents per share on $1.94 billion in revenue.

ANALYST TAKE: In a note to clients, Jefferies & Co. analyst Youssef Squali predicted the company's results will meet "muted expectations" and that management will maintain a cautious outlook for the rest of the year due to weakened consumer demand and eBay's ongoing work to improve its marketplace.

Squali rates eBay shares "Buy" with a $20 price target.

WHAT'S AHEAD: EBay is increasingly trying to focus on its marketplace and payment businesses and shed parts of the business that don't really fit in. This month, the company agreed to pay up to $1.2 billion to buy all outstanding common shares and American Depositary Shares of South Korea's biggest online marketplace, Gmarket.

Just two days earlier, eBay had said it plans to separate Internet communications service Skype from the rest of the company through an initial public offering in 2010. EBay bought Skype for $2.6 billion in 2005, but later wrote down much of its value - essentially an acknowledgment that the company had hugely overvalued it.

STOCK PERFORMANCE: Shares declined 10 percent during the quarter to close at $12.56 on March 31. The stock has since rebounded and traded at $13.94 in afternoon trading Monday, down 45 cents.

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Banks that are getting taxpayer bailouts awarded their top executives nearly $1.6 billion in salaries, bonuses, and other benefits last year, an Associated Press analysis reveals.

The rewards came even at banks where poor results last year foretold the economic crisis that sent them to Washington for a government rescue. Some trimmed their executive compensation due to lagging bank performance, but still forked over multimillion-dollar executive pay packages.

Benefits included cash bonuses, stock options, personal use of company jets and chauffeurs, home security, country club memberships and professional money management, the AP review of federal securities documents found.

The total amount given to nearly 600 executives would cover bailout costs for many of the 116 banks that have so far accepted tax dollars to boost their bottom lines.

Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services committee and a long-standing critic of executive largesse, said the bonuses tallied by the AP review amount to a bribe "to get them to do the jobs for which they are well paid in the first place.

"Most of us sign on to do jobs and we do them best we can," said Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat. "We're told that some of the most highly paid people in executive positions are different. They need extra money to be motivated!"

The AP compiled total compensation based on annual reports that the banks file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The 116 banks have so far received $188 billion in taxpayer help. Among the findings:

The quest for bionic limbs is yielding stunning results: Prototype prosthetic arms can pick a credit card out of a pocket, scratch an itchy nose and even move based on a human's brain waves.

But while these prototypes are spectacularly more advanced than anything developed before, they also show just how far researchers and engineers have to go before they can approach the sublime handiness of the hand. Our natural limbs will surely always be more flexible, sensitive and dexterous than any copy our limbs can design and build.

But that doesn't mean we should stop trying. University of Michigan materials science and engineering professor David Martin, along with colleagues from several other departments at Michigan, are working together on the basic science that could lead to bionic limbs that would impress even the 1970s TV hero Steve Austin.

They are being funded by a grant from the U.S. Army in the amount of--you guessed it--$6 million. The hope, of course, is to restore some semblance of normal life to soldiers who have lost limbs, like the scores of Iraq veterans victimized by those wretched improvised explosive devices.

The Michigan researchers are working on one of the thorniest problems confronting bionic body parts, their interfaces with human bone, muscle, nerves and skin.

Recent advances in bionic limbs are largely thanks to the U.S. military's research and development agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, which is funding a program called "revolutionizing prosthetics" that focuses specifically on arms and hands.

One of DARPA's two main contractors, inventor Dean Kamen's company DEKA, has produced a prototype that has been tested on patients in laboratories and will soon be put into trials in peoples' homes.