But that fateful day in May will be a reminder that Wall Street and Silicon Valley don't always play well together.

Airtime

When the man who created Napster and helped launch Facebook talks, the tech industry listens.

And when Sean Parker and partner Shawn Fanning tease something new called Airtime, techies fall all over themselves to see what the next great innovation will be.

But then, at a fancy launch event featuring celebrities such as Alicia Keys and Snoop Dogg, Parker announces that it's ... basically, a random Web chat tool.

Cue the collective, "Huh?"

It didn't help that, at that fancy event, Airtime crashed over and over again. Or that folks had a hard time seeing how it would be different than Chatroulette (although Parker promised more users would actually be wearing pants).

In October, Parker admitted that Airtme, launched with more than $33 million in backing, had just 10,000 active users. (That's $3,300 spent per user, if you're scoring along at home.)

"Running a startup is like eating glass," he said at the All Things D conference. "You just start to like the taste of your own blood."

Ouch.

Online coupons

"These aren't your grandma's coupons!" the digital generation so brashly declared.

With their mobile apps and irreverent style, daily-deal offerings such as Groupon and Living Social were all the rage as 2012 dawned.

Now? Um, not so much.

Groupon, perhaps the best-known player in the field, watched its value plummet 79% in 2012. Its stock value dropped about three-quarters since opening in November 2011 as high-profile investors washed their hands of it.

And this is the company Google reportedly tried to buy for $6 billion in 2010.

LivingSocial, meanwhile, announced last month it was laying off 400 people. That's after announcing months of revenue losses.

So what happened? Inbox fatigue made some users stop checking the deals. A glut of offers you don't care about (pottery classes?) can make your eyes glaze over. And some businesses quit making offers, saying they never saw the promised returns on their investment.

Nexus Q

When Google gets something right, they get it really, really right.