— The Houston startup company planning to redevelop the former Naval Station Ingleside is on track to close on the sale Sept. 15 as planned and is negotiating with several tenants, company executives told port commissioners Tuesday.

Canyon Supply and Logistics plans to develop Canyon Port, an offshore oil service complex on the former navy base, which closed last year.

Between now and the closing date, the company will continue conducting land surveys and studies while finalizing its business plans. C

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Welcome to another in our One on One series of conversations with some of the most thought-provoking entrepreneurs, authors and experts in business today. Trevor Dryer, head of Product Management, Mobile Payments and Point-of-Sale at Intuit, spoke with Brent Leary in this interview, which has been edited for publication. To hear audio of the full interview, page down to the loudspeaker icon at the end of the post.

Trevor Dryer: Mobile commerce is just getting started. Smartphone adoption is going through the roof.

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— Cobridge Communications now provides digital home phone service to more than 25,000 homes in the Portland and Rockport areas.

The new feature offers unlimited local and long distance calling to anywhere in the United States.

Digital phone service is part of planned upgrades for the Rockport-area system Cobridge purchased from Charter Communications in 2010, according to a company press release.

Cobridge offers television, high-speed Internet, phone and business class services, primarily in rural and suburban markets in six states.

While Nashville, TN is friendly to Big Business and congratulates itself for every corporation that relocates its headquarters in the vicinity, it’s love for entrepreneurship is not quite so uniform. Unless there’s a photo op or some way for politicians to congratulate themselves for attracting a business, people wanting to start a home based business have been told, essentially, to move to the back of the bus.

In the report Home-based businesses take a hit from Metro Council

As the City Paper notes:

Existing Metro law already allows residents to operate businesses from their houses, but it doesn’t permit patrons to visit for business purposes. Thus,

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In small business finance news, a new survey shows that while the amount of workers hired and their salaries have decreased across larger metropolitan cities, optimism among small business seems to be increasing.

SurePayrolls Small Business Scorecard, which includes statistics for 34 metropolitan areas, showed that small business optimism increased from 52 percent in April to 75 percent in May. Even though optimism seems to be on the rise, the same survey reports a national loss of 2.3 percent in hiring and a decrease in salary of 0.3 percent per paycheck.

The survey used payroll data from the companys 32,000 customers, and focused only on responses from businesses with eight employees or fewer.

SurePayroll president Michael Alter said small businesses recovery is key to the economy getting back on track.

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The Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD) Act, which took effect in late February, is good news for consumers who use credit cards, but could be bad news for small business owners, SMSmallBiz reports.

The CARD act affects only consumer, not business, credit cards. But like consumers, in the past few years business owners have been hit by rising interest rates and fees on their business credit cards. They’ve also been struggling with rising costs for accepting credit and debit cards. I

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