New Service

Kathy Miller opened an evening community mental health clinic, Naje Fattouche and Salim Hammoud are planning to clone a healthy fast-food restaurant and Jane Arason started manufacturing a futon that folds to look like a dresser. These small businesses and many more are thriving with the help of the Anne Arundel Economic Development Corp., which just opened a Small Business Resource Center at its offices in Annapolis to make this help more readily available. The center will create one-stop shopping for services that until now have been provided "in a haphazard way, on the fly," said Bill Badger, president and chief executive of the development corporation.

For cell-phone users who are not entirely happy with their service, this is a good time to think about changing carriers. The holidays and their attendant shopping crush are history. Cell phone service providers have been letting customers take their phone numbers along when they select a new carrier for nearly two months now, and many process bugs have been fixed. So now is the time to seriously consider your wireless phone service. First of all, you need to decide what is good about your current service and what is not so good.

As corporate scandals and a sluggish economy sent stocks tumbling in recent years, Cecil Federal Savings Bank in Elkton noticed that jittery investors were eager to put their cash back into the safety of a bank savings account. But until recently, customers were reluctant to deposit more than the $100,000 limit covered by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., depriving the small community bank of a larger share of deposits. A new service is allowing Cecil Federal and a growing number of small Maryland banks to safeguard funds beyond federal insurance limits by swapping customer deposits through a nationwide network of banks.

With companies gearing up - no pun intended - for the fall and the holiday selling seasons, midsummer is down time in the consumer electronics cosmos. Not the case in the world of online music. Roxio, the company that refined the art of burning CDs, is preparing to launch its new service, called ... Napster! The roaring success of Apple's iTunes music service has opened the gate for other new Web players. There's BuyMusic, RealNetworks, AOL and Amazon in the distribution queue, and even Microsoft - surprise!

With predictions looming of the longest strike to hit the phone industry in a generation - long before competition from cell phones or e-mail - Verizon Communications Inc. and two unions representing tens of thousands of its workers remain at odds over job security issues as the clock ticks down on a contract due to expire at midnight tomorrow. About 79,000 Verizon workers from Maine to Virginia - including 7,200 in Maryland - are poised to strike if the two sides can't reach an agreement by tomorrow night, an outcome that industry analysts contend is very likely.

If a shared interest in art films, long walks on the beach and candlelight dinners hasn't worked its romantic magic, perhaps a mutual background in psychotherapy will lead to a lasting relationship. That's the premise, at least, behind TheraDate, a fledgling matchmaking service designed exclusively for people who are in analysis. The idea isn't as farfetched as it may sound. Many therapists say that single clients occasionally ask them if they know of anyone who might make a good romantic match.

Erin Chance of Canton isn't betting on Inner Harbor traffic anymore. Like a growing number of workers, she's opting to DASH downtown. Brightly colored new blue, green and yellow DASH buses -- an acronym for Downtown Area Shuttle -- whisked 139 riders to their destinations yesterday morning, two weeks and two days after an ambitious federally funded transportation experiment was launched. "That represents about a 50 percent increase," said Patrick Coughlin of Yellow Bus, operations manager of the fledgling system.

AT&T agreed yesterday to sell its cable television business, the nation's largest, to Comcast Corp. for about $72 billion in stock and debt. The deal would create a cable behemoth with more than 22 million subscribers, almost twice the size of the next-biggest cable operator, AOL Time Warner, which was a losing bidder in the deal. The combined company, to be called AT&T Comcast Corp., would have lines into one-fifth of the nation's homes, links capable of providing not only cable television programs but high-speed Internet access and, in some cases, telephone service.

In official ceremonies held last week at Newark (N.J.) International Airport, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey officially opened its new 1.9-mile airport monorail link, which connects the airport with Amtrak's Northeast Corridor. The $769 million monorail project, which began serving passengers in October, is the first rail-to-plane link in the New York metropolitan area, and provides passengers with a direct link to Amtrak and New Jersey Transit trains, which share the same railroad line.

Amtrak will triple the number of weekday trains offering high-speed Acela Express service through Baltimore, giving travelers a faster option to New York and Boston. The new service, which will begin July 9, is a continuation of Amtrak's goal to replace its Metroliner trains with the new Acela. In the six months since its launch Dec. 11, Acela took in $15.3 million in ticket sales to 130,486 passengers. Revenue was slightly higher than expected and ridership slightly lower than projections, according to Amtrak.