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Every now and then a product comes along - either from a startup or as a project within a larger company - that seems to meet a worthy need but just doesn't find its legs. Sometimes great ideas are pushed on us too quickly, or are ahead of their time, and other products capitalize on this market months and years down the road. As senior associate Andrew Parker pointed out Wednesday on his blog The Gong Show, this is precisely what happened with the Q&A service boom we see flourishing today.

Failure. All startups fear it. Many, at one point or another, encounter it. There's no denying that failure is a big part of startup culture. Some of the best and brightest preach the "fail fast" methodology, wherein quickly launching and fixing small failures can help avoid "the big one."

Whether you subscribe to this practice or not, the reality is that startups fail all the time, and luckily many entrepreneurs share their experiences "post-mortem" with the community. We've covered a handful of these posts from startups, but now ChubbyBrain has put together a hefty collection of these essays for your education.

There is a lot of competition out there in startup land, and often times similar companies launch around the same time and are pitted against one another in head-to-head competition. This was the case in 2007 when personal finance startup Mint launched less than a year after competitor Wesabe. Over time, it would be Mint that would win over the hearts and minds of the Web, leading to a hefty acquisition by Intuit, and the shuttering of Wesabe. So what was it that helped Mint emerge victorious?

When startups fail and are forced to shut down, often times one of the co-founders will offer a short blog post about what happened and why the company wasn't able to succeed. Not everyone does however, as reveling in your own failure isn't the most fun thing to do. In the case of the failed individual journalism platform NewsTilt, co-founder Paul Biggar penned a 7,000 word essay last week that painstakingly details how and why his company ultimately failed, providing a must-read set of lessons for any entrepreneur.

It's hard to believe that it is May already as a third of the year is complete and summer is almost here. With graduation season upon us, perhaps the entrepreneurs of tomorrow will want to take a look at the most popular startup stories from this week in our Weekly Wrapup. This week we've got more pitch deck suggestions, dealing with PR disasters and learning from failure. Also, we discuss some new data surrounding angel-backed companies, founders as long-term CEOs and how intellectual property effects innovation.

Devver, maker of developer coding tools and TechStars 2008 graduate, announced last Monday that it would be shutting down after being active for nearly two years. News of a startup closing up shop is never a fun thing to hear about, but fortunately many lessons can be gleaned from the experiences of the entrepreneurs. Today, co-founder Ben Brinckerhoff provided just such lessons with an insightful blog on the Devver journey and why he and co-founder Dan Mayer are choosing to move on.

In our yearly wrap-ups of the best products of 2009, we cannot but notice the shadow that falls over the editorial desk.

We are chilled and saddened by the ghosts of the past year - the apps that should have been, the startups that failed to launch, the brilliant ideas that were throttled, the great minds that were fired, the tech heroes that committed tragic gaffes. But some failures were so monumental that they require specific enumeration and commentary. Here are the 10 worst tech failures of 2009.

Fear of failure rarely keeps serial entrepreneurs down. In fact, said Marc Pincus, CEO of Zynga at today's FailCon event, "As entrepreneurs and programmers we're used to failing aren't we? If you look at it as A/B testing until you get the perfect product, then it's not an issue. It's important to learn from it...Otherwise, honestly, why change a f@#king thing if you're not going to measure the impact?"

Do crashing computers and busted Blackberries completely freak you out? Does a cryptic error message on your screen leave you feeling defeated or discouraged? According to a new study from the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, your age might have something to do with your attitudes and emotions surrounding technology.