... and close the door behind him. The mascot butler on the Ask website is retiring from his duties as overseer of searches after a long stretch working for various masters of his household since late 1995. The original idea was as the icon to represent a question-answering service, putting forward a human front to those difficult-to-find answers. The current Ask.com web site has a much slimmer staff and shop front à la Google. The official putting-out-to-grass ends the indecision about the poor butler's uncertain fate, which hung in the balance while current owner IAC/InterActive Corp polled user feedback about his possible axing.
The £10,000 award that Co-Operative Systems received from the Inner City Entrepreneur (ICE) Fund, together with internal funding was invested into a 1-year supervised management development programme over 2005. We are pleased to announce that the 6 staff on the programme Philip Anthony, Nicole Antonelli, Zorina Baksh, Mark Curtis, Ken Flury, and Anslem Munroe, all successfully completed the programme and gained National Vocational Qualifications in Management in early 2006. Many thanks to ICE for their support. We are seeing the benefit of the skills acquired on a daily basis.
