The justin.tv/twitch/socialcam founders sold their first startup's site (kiko - the first AJAX calendar) on ebay once it failed. The ending bid was over $250,000. Not sure if ebay is the best place for this but it is an interesting story. Flippa, as mentioned by someone else, also fills this role.
I love usemin. It is really simple and works perfect for my workflow. In development, it allows me to have all my js and css files referenced normally. In my build process, usemin concats all the js and css files, minifies them, and replaces the references to them to the minified concatenated resource. You don't have to have any script running watching your files for changes or anything like that.
This is the not the case anymore. A lot of the early loses were necessary investments to establish the infrastructure needed to compete with google in search.
I'm not talking "early losses". Microsoft lost $1 billion every year on Bing until at least two years ago. Compare that to Google profiting billions every year and you can see Bing is no Google.
Like you, I had similar information and I've tried a couple of different paths to figure out what the current state of affairs is. There are some Microsofties reading this, feel free to let me know off line (I'll keep your confidence) whether or not these gains are being translated into bottom line improvements yet.
Since Bing is only 5 years old, I would consider losses 2 years ago to still be early. Also, reported numbers were usually on Microsoft Online Services Division as a whole which included other money losing businesses like MSN
I don't feel comfortable giving my amazon login credentials like a lot of people here. I think Unioncy (https://unioncy.com/) has an interesting solution to this. They parse your emails for amazon receipts to figure out your amazon purchases.
