Pandora P also projected a revenue range for the current quarter that was above Wall Street’s estimates. The stock jumped more than 19% in after-hours trades.

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Watch the clip below, but don’t miss the real Pandora CEO Joe Kennedy, who will be live at the upcoming D: Dive Into Mobile conference on Oct. 29 and 30. There’s still time to get tickets — but not that much time, so register here.

Cheryl Mills has dealt with some major foreign policy challenges, including global hunger and food security, as well as leading the State Department’s diplomacy and development efforts in Haiti.

She will appear with a former colleague – Katie Jacobs Stanton, who is now Twitter’s international strategy head, after a stint at the State Department — to talk about the intersection of mobile and social media with foreign policy and humanitarian efforts around the globe, using the Haiti earthquake as a prime example. This topic couldn’t be more timely and Mills and Stanton are at the center of if all.

Mills was previously at New York University, Oxygen Media, and the White House Counsel’s office.

Joe Kennedy is the CEO of Pandora, the Internet radio company that is driven by mobile use.

Pandora shifted to mobile faster and better than many of its Web peers, but the company is still working on getting to profitability.

Still, the Pandora product has inspired much competition, most recently and notably from Spotify and, perhaps soon, Apple. In addition to that, we’ll definitely be talking to Kennedy about international expansion prospects.

Kennedy joined Pandora in 2004, after being at E-Loan and Saturn. He calls himself “Pandora’s resident pop music junkie.”

Register now if you’d like to join Mills, Kennedy and the rest of our fabulous lineup of Dive Into Mobile speakers from Google, Facebook, Nokia, WhatsApp, Xiaomi, Verizon Wireless and more, as well as a great array of start-ups and Global Voices. The conference runs Oct. 29 and 30 in New York City.

No problem, says CEO Joe Kennedy, who is happy to describe a glass more than half full in an interview before the company’s earnings call this afternoon.

He wants investors to pay attention to the company’s increasing share of the radio listening market, which he estimates has doubled, to 5.5 percent in the last year.

And he says they should also be impressed with his mobile ad revenues, which hit $33 million last quarter and totalled $100 million for the fiscal year. That’s up from $25 million over the previous year.

Mobile is particularly important for Pandora, since it was the iPhone, along with Android handsets, that really spiked its growth in advance of its IPO last year. But Wall Street has worried that Kennedy wouldn’t be able to take advantage of that growth.

Kennedy argues that Pandora made more money on mobile ads than any other Web company besides Google last year. (Anyone want to help fact-check that?)

OK. So what about the misses? Kennedy notes that Pandora still delivered revenue within its guidance range, though that’s not the kind of argument that Wall Street generally goes for. More practically, he says that holiday ad spending was a “touch lighter than we expected.”

On top of that, the pricing that Pandora got for its unsold ad inventory, which it hands off to third-party ad networks, was also lower than expected in January.

Kennedy made the same arguments during his earnings call, but that hasn’t convinced traders, who have pushed Pandora shares down 20 percent since the market closed.

Investors are yawning, though, and perhaps even frowning a bit — they’ve knocked a few cents off the company’s share price in after-hours trading, and it’s now down 3 percent, to $11.50.

For the record: The streaming music/Web radio service generated $75 million and non-GAAP earnings of 2 cents, topping street estimates of $71 million and a one-cent loss. It bumped up revenue and earnings predictions for both the next quarter and all of 2012.

And while the initial earnings report doesn’t disclose the breakdown, Pandora CEO Joe Kennedy says that mobile streams — Pandora is huge on the iPhone, and very big on Android — once again constituted about 70 percent of the music the company pumped out in the last quarter. Mobile ads made up about half the company’s ad revenue, he said.

So what about competition from new services like Spotify, which launched in the summer and got a huge boost from Facebook this fall, and Clear Channel’s “iheartradio” service? Nothing to see here, Kennedy said during his prepared remarks: “We have seen no impact on our growth trends from any of the activities of other digital music services.”

(Image from animal-space.net)

And by the end of Thursday, following a 24 percent stock drop, Pandora was worth $2.1 billion.

What happened?

Anyone who can tell you, with a straight face, why Pandora investors bid the stock up one day and crushed it the next is full of it.

But just to be clear: Other than showing up at the New York Stock Exchange to ring the bell and give some interviews, Pandora executives didn’t do a thing to make the company more or less valuable in the last two days. And nothing outside the company affected its intrinsic value, either.

So unless you’re day-trading, Pandora’s temporary gyrations shouldn’t be that interesting. More interesting: What do the company’s next couple years look like? And crucially, what happens in 2015, when the company’s music licenses get reset?

Here’s Pandora CEO Joe Kennedy’s take, via an edited Q&A I conducted with him in the IPO aftermath:

Peter Kafka: Pandora only offers Web radio, which has been great for you because it means you haven’t had to strike individual licensing deals with music labels. But it also limits the service you can offer. Do you think you’ll end up working with the music industry to expand your offerings?

Joe Kennedy: Our focus is on radio. The research indicates that 80 percent of the average American’s music consumption is in radio form. Only 20 percent is CDs, or iTunes, iPod or whatever. We’ve dedicated ourselves to that 80 percent of the market, radio-like listening, serendipitous listening. It leverages 11-plus years of intellectual property, and that really is our focus as a company.

We’re more than happy to leave the 20 percent to Sony Walkmen, iPods, iTunes, iCloud, Rhapsody, MOG, Spotify, you name it.

But a lot of people seem to think of you in the same category as all of those other services, anyway. Is that a good thing?

Consumers do this 80 percent/20 percent thing without thinking about it. I don’t think they’ve ever thought about it consciously.

As far as general commentary about digital music, I think there is a lack of discrimination: “Oh, it’s digital music. Oh, it’s streaming.” By implication, it all meets the same consumer need. I think that will go through increased refinement and precision over time.

But some services are going to end up mashing up different kinds of features, anyway. Google was reportedly trying to offer a cloud locker, and a store, and a Web radio service like yours. You sure you want to stay streaming radio only?

Yes. We’d rather be best in the world at one thing that’s a great big piece of the market than be less-than-best in the world at several things.

The licensing deal you have goes away in 2015, and lots of people think that when that happens, the music industry will insist on extracting every bit of revenue they can from you. You’ll be worth $3 billion and they’ll want to grab $2.9 billion of it for themselves. How do you plan for that?

We operate under Federal statutory licenses. The license mandates arbitration proceedings every five years, and it’s Federally administered. It’s not a negotiated process. We believe that that process will yield an economically reasonable outcome.

So let me translate: What you’re staying is that this isn’t like iTunes, or Spotify, where a label could say, “I don’t want to participate.”

It’s fundamentally different.

And you’re saying that at some point, you’ll have a deal, brokered by a neutral party, and that if it’s at least not fair, it will be equally disappointing for both sides. And that you guys can live with that.

The law proscribes that judges determine the rates at which a willing buyer and a willing seller would meet in a marketplace transaction. No party has the ability to say, “I’m not in.” It is an economic analysis.

You usage is up dramatically, driven in large part by mobile use via Android and the iPhone. But mobile revenue isn’t that big for you. How do you change that?

We generate considerable revenue from mobile. I believe we’re one of the biggest mobile advertising sites in the country. Today, mobile advertising is more nascent than desktop advertising, which took 10 to 15 years to develop, but mobile is growing far faster. Key pieces of the puzzle, like third-party measurement, are just coming in. We’ll benefit tremendously from that.

Radio advertising is local, and you guys are predominantly selling national spots. Are you going to have to ramp up to sell locally?

That’s part of the advertising opportunity. But the vast majority of the biggest national online brands spending money on the interactive market — the vast majority of them already spend money on Pandora. We have the opportunity to take that spending and expand it to mobile. So we don’t see our opportunity limited to one bucket or another. We’re fully legitimately an online player, fully legitimately a mobile player, and fully legitimately a radio player.

Cars are a big part of the bull story for you guys — that at some point you’re going to be competing directly with radio on most people’s dashboards. When does that become a big deal for you?

We’ve had announcements from six of the world’s major automakers — Ford, Toyota, GM, Mercedes, BMW and Hyundai — and they’ve all said “we’re going to integrate Pandora into our vehicles going forward.” Now, the nature of automotive is, it isn’t a flip-the-switch phenomena. It rolls out over several models, over time. And then you have a replacement cycle that’s about 7 years per car. So I think of automotive as a snowball, that starts out relatively small, but builds and builds and builds and builds. You get out to years five to ten, and it’s tremendously big.

So five to 10 years?

The way I’d phrase it is that it starts out relatively small, and snowballs.

And over the next five years, we have the explosion of smartphones. They’re selling at a 15 million per quarter pace in the U.S. alone, 15 million android and iPhones. A good year in the car business in 15 million.

It’s another packed week for tech, especially in Silicon Valley, where the kibitzing never ends and the econalypse is almost completely ignored.

First up this week is an event today at which BoomTown will appear called “The Free! Summit: Inside the Digital Economy” in San Mateo.

Given all the recent debate about free versus paid, as traditional media companies take aim at the issue, it should be interesting.

I will be on an afternoon panel called “Business Models That Work,” which is about the the future of news and what’s next for journalism in the digital economy.

The other panelists are: Dan Gillmor, Director, Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, Arizona State University; Alan Mutter, Adjunct Faculty Member, Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley and founder, “Reflections of a Newsosaur”; and Marshall Van Alstyne, Associate Professor of Information Economics, Boston University and Visiting Professor, MIT.

Later in the day, the event will morph into the third “Tech Policy Summit,” where I get to do a one-on-one interview with Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer, Chris Kelly, who is still at the social-networking site but is also now running for the job of California’s Attorney General.

(My All Things Digital partner Walt Mossberg will appear on Tuesday, along with a solid slate of speakers.)

On Thursday, ContentNext Media is holding its third EconSm conference, this time focusing on mobile, in an all-day event in San Francisco.

Speakers include: Zander Lurie, CFO, CBS (CBS) Interactive; angel investor Ron Conway (see my recent video interview with him here); Eric Johnson, president and COO, Wolfgang’s Vault; Joe Kennedy, CEO and president, Pandora; and Kevin Thau, director of mobile business development at Twitter.

Wrote paidContent’s Staci Kramer: “Much has changed as we get ready for our third EconSM–including the name. The acronym is still the same but this year it’s about the intersection of social and mobile. Social media has passed the gimmick stage–although not everyone has figured that out–and is part of the daily fabric for an increasing number of people.”

And, if you have even more time, the Aspen Institute has just published J.D. Lasica’s 110-page e-book, “Identity in the Age of Cloud Computing: The Next-Generation Internet’s Impact on Business, Governance and Social Interaction.”

Lasica told me that he wrote the report after a roundtable of 30 experts in identity and technology (people like John Seely Brown and Esther Dyson) was convened in Aspen to discuss the ramifications of the cloud on a societal level.

He talked the Aspen Institute into releasing the e-book under a Creative Commons license, the first time it has ever done that.

And lest you think this is too focused on just Silicon Valley, I missed attending the Seattle 2.0 Awards last week, but here are the winners:

Best Start-up: Picnik
Best Boot-strapped Start-up: Picnik
Best Start-up CEO: Jonathan Sposato (Picnik)
Best Start-up Technologist: Nat Brown (iLike)
Best Venture Capitalist: Matt McIlwain (Madrona Venture Group)
Best Angel Investor: Geoff Entress
Best Start-up Product Designer: Peter Roman (Picnik)
Best Service Provider to Start-ups: Shannon Swift (Swift HR Solutions)
Best Blog from/about Start-ups: TechFlash/John Cook
Best Social Event for Start-ups: Lunch 2.0 by Josh Maher