Net income in eBay’s second quarter, ended June 30, fell 29 percent to $327 million, or 25 cents a share, from $460 million, or 35 cents a share from a year earlier. Revenue fell four percent to $2.1 billion.

The results came in at the high end of the Q2 outlook eBay provided back in April when the company said it expected revenue of between $1.85 billion and $2.05 billion and earnings per share of between 23 cents and 26 cents.

“We drove solid second quarter results, with strong momentum and market share gains at PayPal and continued stabilization in our core eBay business,” eBay CEO John Donahoe in a statement. “I’m pleased with our pace, our progress and our performance.”

Can’t be much pleased with the company’s core online-auction business, though. That continues to show weakness. The amount of goods and services flowing through eBay’s (EBAY) marketplace, called “gross merchandise volume,” fell 10 percent year-over-year to $11.1 billion. And that’s not good. Especially when Amazon.com (AMZN) is gaining market share so quickly.

“The core eBay marketplaces business continues to be the most important driver for eBay’s share price,” Heath Terry of FBR Capital Markets said in a note to clients this week. “While the company is making progress, management still has a long way to go in addressing the years of technological neglect at the company.”

We’ve hit bottom. Finally.

In its latest “US and Global IT Market Outlook” report, Forrester (FORR) says information technology spending in 2009 will fall 10.6 percent in 2009. And while that’s far worse than the three percent decline the research outfit forecast at the beginning of the year, it’s also the nadir of this particular crisis, and we are at the beginning of a rebound that will gain momentum in 2010.

According to Forrester, anyway.

“While Q1 2009 saw a scary drop in purchases in the U.S. tech market, ironically that is good news for the long run and we expect to see a stronger rebound sooner,” Forrester analyst Andrew Bartels said in a statement. “The big drops are not precursors to further declines; rather, we think they are evidence of a temporary pause in U.S. tech purchases, which we expect to start recovering in Q4 as businesses realize that they overreacted in the first quarter.”

So after a year of gloom and doom, things are beginning to look up.