+1 love to see companies with innovative interview process that go beyond standard tech interviews and really try get to know applicants. I chose an internship one summer just because I enjoyed the interview process so much.
Actually zimride got sold to enterprise. Maybe they needed to build out the two-sides of the marketplace before being able to actually do "ride-sharing"
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.
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
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.