Mobile travel startup WorldMate just announced the appointment of a new chief executive, one who’s supposed to help the company expand its partnerships with big brands in the travel industry.

The Palo Alto, Calif., company’s new CEO is Jean Tripier, who previously worked as chief strategy officer and chief operating officer at Good Technology, an enterprise mobile company that was acquired by, then spun off from, Motorola. He was also vice president of corporate development at Vodafone, where he oversaw the launch of Vodafone Romania.

One of Tripier’s big missions at WorldMate will be to work with travel companies that want to create co-branded mobile applications with WorldMate, such as the BlackBerry application announced by Virgin Blue last month. Virgin gets WorldMate features like weather reports, flight notifications, and currency calculators, while WorldMate gets greater distribution (and, presumably, some revenue).

Founding CEO Nadav Gur will remain with WorldMate as chief commercial officer.

The company has raised $11 million from backers including BlackBerry Partners Fund and Motorola Ventures, and it says it has 5 million users. Recent improvements include integration with LinkedIn.