1. “Firefox OS? What the f**k?” asked AllThingsD’s Walt Mossberg, kicking off the day’s first interview. Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs said it’s all about the open Web standards that underlie the forthcoming Firefox operating system.
2. Google may not have 44 million robotic cars on the road, but Waze has 44 million users, Waze CEO Noam Bardin said, and they make Waze’s maps better by using them. Bardin touted the power of crowdsourced driving directions, which so far have “validated” about 1.5 billion km (or about 932 million miles).
3. Google’s Jason Spero, appearing with Millennial Media’s Mollie Spillman, said that mobile ads will have more potential once they can track user behavior for advertisers’ sake. However, Spillman added, “It’s becoming more mainstream and mandatory that mobile is part of the marketing budget or media spend.”
4. Xiaomi sold 7.19 million handsets in 2012, and expects to sell double that number this year. The high-end smartphone company is one of China’s fastest-growing. “We believe the future of the mobile Internet is really about services,” said company president Bin Lin.
5. Lady Gaga’s manager Troy Carter simultaneously balanced Gaga’s plans for a hybrid album-app with the fact that physical CD sales are still incredibly important in the music business: “You can’t shock the water in our business. It’s about gradual change,” he said. “You still have to cater to the market that’s out there.”

For more, please check out our full list of stories from D: Dive Into Mobile. See you tomorrow!

Cool for phone sales (see Apple and Samsung)! Not so cool, however, for ad sales execs, who have spent the past two decades trying to sell Web real estate to advertisers. Now they’ve got to figure out how to sell that space on even smaller screens.

Enter Google’s Jason Spero and Millennial Media’s Mollie Spilman, two of the people charged with figuring out how to usher in (read: sell) a new era of online advertising.

The biggest problem? Helping advertisers see when their mobile ads are actually working.

“Until you can show [that tracking connection], they’re not going to pay as much for it,” Google’s Spero said at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference. “We’re investing heavily in helping people track the value.”

It’s obviously not a Google-only problem. Others, especially Facebook and Twitter, are trying to figure out ways to tie things like tweets and shares directly to consumer activity, and to show just how far something like a promoted tweet really goes for an advertiser willing to shell out a hundred grand on it.

It’s also likely the reason that advertisers aren’t willing to spend as much on a mobile ad compared to, say, a desktop ad or traditional media ads in print or on TV.

“Sometimes [advertiser activity] is coming from this test sort of mentality,” Spilman said.

Ever the optimists, Spilman and Spero are confident that things are looking up. “It’s becoming more mainstream and mandatory that mobile is part of the marketing budget or media spend,” Spilman said.

The best way to build on that, Spero said, is ultimately to make the tools to figure out if it’s actually working better over time.

“We have a responsibility that our customers can attribute the maximum amount of what they’re buying … and to make that scalable,” Spero said.

Mozilla, the foundation behind the popular Firefox Web browser, wants to take the lead amid the multiple companies vying for third place. The company is working on the Firefox OS, a mobile system software initiative similar to what Google is doing with the Chrome OS for the desktop. In a nutshell, it’s taking the set of standards coding for a browser environment and bringing it to an entire operating system for the phone.

Here’s the thing: If the duopoly of the massively popular Android and iOS is working for consumers — and sales prove that it obviously is — why do we need a new operating system entirely?

Or, as Walt Mossberg put it so aptly: “Firefox OS. What the f**k?”

Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs’s answer, in two words: The ecosystem.

Kovacs made the case for Firefox OS at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference today, claiming that while consumers may enjoy the many apps they have now, that experience will grow exponentially if Firefox OS is adopted.

“Our whole mission is to stimulate the ecosystem,” Kovacs said, citing the first wave of innovation that Mozilla’s Firefox browser created years ago when first released. “The number of people, websites and experiences exploded.”

The main pitch here is to developers: Unlike Android or iOS, Firefox OS apps are based on open Web standards, which many developers came of age using over the rise of the first dot-com boom.

And that could appeal to coders in the developing world, where the Firefox OS is really targeted. Worldwide low-cost (under $150) smartphone shipments are forecast to grow to 311 million in 2016, after having doubled every year since 2010, according to research data from NPD group. Markets like South America, Africa and Asia are ripe for the targeting in going after the low end.

Of course, Kovacs and company will face stiff competition, as both Google and Facebook are going after international emerging markets with Android and Facebook Home, respectively.

Kovacs admits that we may not see the ecosystem explode right off the bat. The company expects the first wave of devices to kick things off, while hoping for wider appeal later on, after developers (hopefully) take up arms and start creating apps for the OS.

“This is a V1 product,” Kovacs said. “Short-term, it will be a brand appeal. But the innovation will explode later.”

Shown off today at the D: Dive Into Mobile conference in New York, Humin is an app that makes your phonebook more than just a repository for numbers and email addresses.

The app has several goals: To add a more human (hence the name) touch to your address book by highlighting your relationship to each contact, to make search easier, and to help you connect with new people through trusted sources.

“We thought it was time for people to really start making sense of relationships. How many times have you looked at your phone and said, ‘How do I even know this person?’” said Ankur Jain, the app’s creator.

Jain joined AllThingsD’s Liz Gannes on stage to demo Humin.

Using your phone’s address book, the app creates a profile for each individual, and pulls information about that contact from various social networks and sources, including Facebook, LinkedIn and Google. You can add notes, such as when and where you met that person, or his or her favorite sports team.

But even if you don’t add notes, Humin “ties deeply” into native apps on your phone to match a contact with a place. Let’s say you meet someone at a conference, which is entered into your calendar. Humin knows that you met John Doe that week, so it’s likely you met John at the conference.

“Naturally, we think in terms of ‘who works at company X and lives in San Francisco?’ Our app lets you type just that and search in a way that’s similar to how our brain works,” Jain said.

The app also searches friends of friends, and tells you which of your contacts is the strongest connection, so you can ask for an introduction.

Privacy and security is always a concern with apps that access your address book. Jain said that all the information that’s pulled from your contact lists, social networks and public records is ingested in the individual’s mobile device.

Humin is scheduled for release this summer as a free iOS app. An Android version will follow soon after.

Prior to starting Humin, Jain founded the Kairos Society, a nonprofit organization for young entrepreneurs and innovators working on solutions for education, biotechnology, healthcare and more.