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Make no mistake: Mark Zuckerberg doesn't want to go public.

It's no secret that Zuckerberg has tried to keep Facebook private as long as possible, believing--rightly or wrongly--that that's the best way to stay nimble and build the business. But at this point, Zuck's got little choice. Facebook has become too big, it has too many shareholders, and so it's on track to go public this spring, eight years after Zuckerberg started Facebook in his Harvard dorm room.

A couple of months ago, the 27-year-old Zuckerberg assembled his top management team to talk about the … Read more

Nick Hughes, the CEO of Seconds, has the best VC pickup line I've ever heard: "Last year, 2 trillion SMS messages were sent in the U.S., and not one reached a local business."

That's a lot of cheddar.

He continues: "Texting is becoming the predominant mode of communication, but we cannot send or receive short messages with local merchants." Hence his business, Seconds, which opens up the SMS channel between merchants and consumers.

Running on the Twilio communications platform, Seconds gives merchants SMS numbers and a console that lets them manage communication with … Read more

The IPO market may have regained its footing--sort of--but clearly not fast enough for some wanting to sell their private shares.

Trading on SecondMarket soared 55 percent in 2011 to a total of $558 million in transactions, as ex-employees, founders and others connected with hot startups cashed out shares. The company creates a marketplace for stock in private companies.

Demand, meanwhile, was huge, with those trying to buy private shares--measured by what SecondMarket calls "indications of interest"--offering more than $6 billion during the year.

SecondMarket says it's now completed more than $1 billion in private company … Read more

LAS VEGAS--The Google Chromebook will live on with a fresh chip upgrade, according to Samsung.

The next-gen Samsung Series 5 Chromebook gains a dual-core Intel Celeron processor and loses the slower Atom silicon, a Samsung representative on the CES show floor told CNET.

Other specs (see photo below) remain pretty much the same, including a 16GB solid-state drive.

Chromebooks aspire to run apps, documents, and settings in the cloud and thereby simplify the overall user experience. In practice, however, reviewers have found that cloud-based computing can be frustrating if the wireless connection is unreliable.

For that, and other reasons, the Chromebook has not sold in numbers comparable to mainstream Windows laptops.

The Series 5 is slated for release in the second quarter. Pricing has not been announced. … Read more

Hard disk drive supplier Seagate Technology provided a financial update today, reiterating that demand for HDD units will exceed supply in 2012 in the wake of flooding last year in Thailand.

Seagate updated its financial outlook for fiscal second quarter 2012 on Wednesday afternoon, stating it shipped approximately 47 million disk drives, which included approximately 700,000 Samsung disk drives.

Revenue is expected to be between $3.1 billion and $3.2 billion, the company said. Analysts had projected revenue of $2.79 billion on average, according to Bloomberg. Seagate completed the acquisition of Samsung's hard disk drive business … Read more

As 2011 draws to a close, Twitter has given us a snapshot of what events in the past 12 months seemed to have captured our interest the most.

Twitter's version of the Year in Review lists prominent events throughout the year along with the tweets they generated per second worldwide on the microblogging site.

It may surprise you to learn that the October 6 death of Steve Jobs was not No. 1 in per-second tweets; indeed, it didn't even make the top 5. Its 6,049 tweets per second were about a 1,000 shy of the per-second … Read more

AT&T gets its first LTE smartphones this weekend, Google Reader is integrated with Google Plus, and we learn more about the death of Microsoft's Courier tablet project.

Links from Tuesday's episode of Loaded:

Windows 8 will include Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization tool in an effort to attract developers, IT pros, and other users who need to run, test, or support virtual environments.

Describing the move in the latest edition of the "Building Windows 8" blog, Mathew John, a program manager on Microsoft's Hyper-V team, noted that Hyper-V has previously been available only in recent server-based editions of Windows, making Windows 8 the first client OS to include the feature.

Virtualization tools such as Hyper-V allow users to run multiple operating systems and environments on the same machine. That's helpful … Read more

(Read our new head-to-head buyer's guide for an updated comparison between the 2012 13-inch MacBook Pro and Air.)

Just a few short months ago (in March, to be exact), we wrote about an odd glut in Apple's otherwise streamlined lineup of products: instead of one or even two 13-inch laptops to choose from, Apple was offering three. The white MacBook, the MacBook Air, and the MacBook Pro each had a slightly different value equation in terms of design, features, and price.

That glut's been lessened a little now that the white MacBook has been discontinued. The MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro are the only two MacBook product lines left, and they represent two different solutions to same problem. The unibody aluminum Pro used to be considered thin, but it's--relatively--thick at 1 inch, and weighs over 4 pounds. The Pro offers better specs, while the Air, which has just been recently updated, leans toward light weight and quick booting as its advantages.

There's more to consider, though: the 2011 13-inch MacBook Pro and new 13-inch MacBook Air have become more similar than they've ever been before, for several reasons: performance, battery life, and a Thunderbolt port.

Two 13-inch MacBooks: which do you choose?… Read more