The battle for digital wallet share is on. The proliferation of cards, e-wallets, apps, and other options has consumers’ and merchants’ heads spinning. While the trend is to digitize everything physical that now exists in wallets, not everyone agrees what the ideal solution is or how it should be implemented.

You think Breaking Bad is just a TV show? Nope: It’s also a set of real lessons from which any startup business can learn. (Though we hope yours is in a more savory product category.)

Marketing doesn’t belong only to the Marketing Department. It behooves every employee to help others perceive the company as one worth doing business with. After all, the people who work in manufacturing, accounting, or software development can only be paid if money funnels into the company.

The job of dealing with an underperforming employee doesn't end when the culprit is shown the door. Often there's a cleanup job that needs to be done after you fired the turkey, looking for the hidden messes and security flaws the ex-employee may have left behind. Otherwise, you’ll still be cleaning up the problems six months later.

Online services do a remarkable job at translating from one language to another (even if they occasionally mess up, yielding “What Will the Future of Machine Translation?”). But linguists and computer scientists are hard at work on a truly Herculean task: Rendering the subtleties of human language into a combination of 0s and 1s to provide translations that are not just more-or-less correct, but idiomatic and flowing. Can they get it done? In your lifetime?

Scripts are the glue that tie together most IT organizations. The problem is, a lot of companies have far too much glue and it's gumming up the works. Scripts, written in dynamic languages or shell scripts, are generally an inefficient, resource heavy, and slow method of accomplishing tasks. You need to sort through your script closet and eliminate or replace the dinosaurs.

Large companies are starting to adjust their operational strategies based on social network chatter. Take customer relationship management, for example. Rather than waiting for “enough” customer service representatives to report a problem that may spur management action, savvy businesses are using tweets and status updates to proactively minimize issues.

We can rationalize our way into virtually any decision, but our gut instincts usually hold all of the answers. Here are five reasons to follow your gut as a path to business success.

More and more companies are training job applicants skills as they apply for the job, not waiting until after the employee is hired. Employers are swooping in to close the skills gap in other innovative ways, too. It's a win-win-win for job seekers, employers, and the country. Here are what employers desperate to hire are doing now, and where you can apply.

Forget Kansas City. How about that Chattanooga's Gigabit Fiber!