What is GigJam? “It's a set of apps for PCs, tablets, and phones which let you call up business information -- from your own emails to figures from corporate databases -- using a built-in version of Microsoft’s Cortana voice assistant,” Fast Company reports. “It's among the first concrete examples of what Microsoft thinks reinventing productivity is all about.”  

Venture Beat reports on the recent acquisition of Artisan, a full-featured mobile marketing company, by third-party ad platform Tune, speculating that the move may be in response to Facebook’s recent super-secret policy shift. Facebook, a monolith in the mobile ad industry, has made waves with a policy change, the details of which aren’t quite known yet, but may force ad publishers to deliver proprietary data in return for analytics information. The ripples haven’t stopped. No details on the Tune–Artisan acquisition have been released yet.

The Atlantic investigates ESPN’s grand plan to dominate digital channels. “ESPN seems impressively open to learning how the digital generation clicks on and watches ESPN -- even if it means changing their own internal definition about what counts as sports news,” it writes. “The shift to mobile is of particular importance to ESPN, which has a lot to win in the new distributed media environment, but also, perhaps, the most to lose.”  

Facebook reportedly wants to change the way it handles user data for mobile advertising. “The move has alarmed some major Facebook publishing partners who see it as a power play and believe it will be bad for consumer privacy,” VentureBeat reports, citing unnamed publishing execs. “Either they choose to forego mobile Facebook advertising, or they turn over to Facebook much of the data about customers installing their apps.” 

Thanks to an update from Google Maps, owners of iOS devices can now share their location to more apps, including Facebook and Facebook’s Messenger. “The new feature, part of Google Maps version 4.8.0, will now make it much easier to send a pin to someone who is on their desktop computer, or who is just too lazy to switch between apps (we all know that person),” The Next Web reports. 

As more ad money flows into digital, marketers have more questions about metrics. “70% of marketing executives polled [out of 400 executives from agencies, media companies and brand marketers] said they would increase their spending on mobile, digital, and social,” says The Wall Street Journal, "if there were better ways to measure return on investment.” Part of the problem appears to be how ROI is measured for online and mobile, which right now is mostly through proxy metrics like ad impressions, store visits, etc. The other part is utilizing data. More than 40% of respondents cited Big Data as the largest …

Several companies, including Google, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, are trying to defeat the mobile conversion monster by including “buy” buttons on their mobile sites, similar to Amazon’s “one-click purchase.” Adam J. Epstein, president of adMarketplace, told TheNew York Times, “In mobile, it’s mobile versus desktop, and if you want to drive transactions, you have to make it simpler than a desktop.” Many mobile users have complained about “fat thumbs” or hard-to-fill-out purchasing and shipping forms on Web sites. The introduction of a buy button could be a game-changer. “Mobile phones are projected to account for about half the time …

The New York Times is using the WhatsApp messaging app to deliver updates on Pope Francis’ visits to Ecuador, Bolivia and Paraguay. “The updates, of which there have been a handful so far, have been a reporter’s notebook style briefing where Jim Yardley, the Times’ Rome bureau chief, plays narrator,” Nieman Lab reports. A unit of Facebook, “WhatsApp claims 800 million monthly active users worldwide, the majority them outside the United States.” 

“Mobile marketing is not reserved for the B2C CMOs of the world,” says Daniel Newman for Forbes. According to the CMOs Guide to Marketing from Oracle Marketing Cloud, 60% of digital media time is now spent on mobile, including tablets. Based on the guide, Newman troubleshoots areas of concern, including SMS and MMS, Push (especially for android), and data management platforms.

Waze -- Google’s online mapping unit -- is testing a carpooling service in Israel. “The new application, called RideWith, will use Waze's navigation system to learn the routes drivers most frequently take to work and match them up with people looking for a ride in the same direction,” Reuters reports.