I met up with Jim Holden, Director of Global Wireless Partnerships at Google last week. Jim is speaking at the Telco 2.0 Brainstorm on how Telco operators can best work with internet players. He will cover some of the partnerships already in place that are delivering trials of Google’s Mobile AdWords in US, UK and Germany as well as the successful partnership with KDDI in Japan.

I put to Jim that there is a lot of fear from operators about Google’s intentions in the Telco space. He is keen to dispel the view that Google is a threat - “we are the solution, not the problem”. For those interested in Ad-Funded Services on Day 2 of the event, Jim points out that Google makes 99% of its revenue from advertising and already shares a substantial chunk of this with operators and ISP’s.

Jim is also keen to educate Telco execs about Google. “I am keen to do interesting events like this to be more transparent about Google so that people do not think of us as some kind of secretive Opus Dei organisation”.

Really looking forward to Jim’s presentation and to see him tighten that cilice!