Google and Facebook can’t help you find which of your friends are single, or live in New York and like Radiohead, but Ark can. Today Y Combinator -backed Ark.com sails into private beta in hopes of becoming the best place on the web to do people searches. With a variety of layer-able filters, Ark lets you search through public profiles and the private data of your friends across Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and other networks. It’s also got filter sets for easily discovering old classmates and new business contacts.

Editor’s Note: This guest post was written by Dan Abelon , Founder of SpeedDate . Dan blogs about global startup issues at WorldStartups.org

Well, it’s been an eventful last few months for Yahoo, hasn’t it? Remember it was just six months ago that Carol Bartz was fired from her position as CEO, and the Yahoo Board created a circle of elders to decide the company’s fate . Then, early this year, Scott Thompson (formerly of PayPal) was appointed CEO, and Yahoo Co-founder Jerry Yang stepped down from the board in mid-January

Norman Winarsky is the Vice President of Ventures and Bill Mark is the Vice President of the Information Computing Sciences Division at SRI International .  Norman and Bill helped found the Siri venture, of which Norman was also a Board member

As Susan Feldman waited outside the Southwest Airlines arrivals terminal at Los Angeles International Airport in October 2008, she had a nervous feeling in her stomach, which she compares to blind date jitters. Except this wasn’t your traditional blind date. Feldman was meeting Ali Pincus, her soon-to-be co-founder, for the first time.

Google recently threw down in the ongoing legal battle between the MPAA and Hotfile with amicus curiae panache. But Google wouldn’t file an amicus brief from the kindness of its algorithmic heart

A few weeks ago at SXSW, Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning briefly mentioned that they were working on a new social video startup called Airtime. Now it looks like the company is opening for business

Amid extra scrutiny from Congress around privacy issues, Apple has started rejecting apps that access UDIDs, or identification numbers that are unique to every iPhone and iPad, this week.

Earlier this month, Redpoint Ventures and BV Capital’s eVentures announced the formation of a new, joint firm in Brazil — called, somewhat predictably, Redpoint eVentures. Managing director Yann de Vries and founding partner Anderson Thees were in the Bay Area this week, so I had a quick talk with them about their plans. Brazil’s startup ecosystem is taking off, but until now, Thees said VC firms have fallen into two camps

It’s a sin I know almost too well as a blogger. It’s slow going for news on a Friday night and the pageview gods send you a reprieve in the form of a tweet. A former Apple engineer is berating the company’s design ethic in the post-Jobs era in less than 140 characters