I just talked to Kim Fennell, the CEO of deCarta, a company famous for providing routing engines and geospatial data architectures that are now involved in car, web and mobile-based, location-based services. deCarta started on the web, providing the routing tech for Google Maps in 2005. Now that geocoding is becoming commoditised, deCarta focuses on mobile, connected nav and MRM.

deCarta’s mobile activities now contribute more than 50% of its revenue in North America. It also represent 90% of the revenue the US carriers are making out of LBS, mainly through off-board navigation. Every mobile operator there has an LBS strategy right now, most have LBS services already out and most work with deCarta indirectly through NIM and Telenav. In Europe deCarta works with 13 operators through Appello

However Kim is pretty clear: Navigation is not an end in itself; deCarta is going for mobile local search or “nav search” to create relevant search results including navigation. The company is working on a spatial search engine using map, geocontent and proximity. It adds the direction to the search so the results first show what is in front of the driver, not all around.

Generating, aggregating and integrating the content is the hard bit. deCarta runs about 20 databases, adding recommendations to them and including the operators' choices of content and so on. This includes such info as traffic and speed camera data. All of this could lead to mobile advertising opportunities.

Since deCarta can also host the entire content and service database, it can act as a prime contractor for the carrier.

The business model to get the content may be varied, free, licence or revenue share based.

The yellow pages type of content needs click-to-navigate on top of click-to-call. The clicks are an expensive ($1) service with advertised search pulling specific content databases from third parties or the operators.

Kim believes the time will come when ads are pushed to the handset. If subs don’t take off or stall then operators will have to accelerate their plans.

Until recently there weren't any major motivators to push them into action. Now there is GPS in most phones, with Nokia, Google and Apple shaking up the market and all trying to take control of the consumer. Local search is an opportunity for the operators to provide relevant service based on content they already own while controlling the revenues.

deCarta has a developer zone (who hasn’t). I suspect this is to get more services to run on their platform and feed into the carrier's nav app, but they are looking for partners to provide an ad platform (they should go to MetaPlaces!).

Kim was very exited about OpenStreetMap (OSM), mentioning he couldn’t wait for the map to include turn restriction information so he could build routing apps on it.

Update: Nick Black, the UK head of CloudMade, told me at GeoMob that turn restrictions were already on the map and that routing was being built by the OSM army as we speak...