At the Blackberry Developers Conference, RIM announced a new services platform for developers that will enable them to build advanced applications for Blackberry smartphones.

The new services platform will offer advertising, payment, content push and new location services.

As the world of mobile moves more and more is being led by advanced consumer services offered on smartphones, the competition is heating up among the major players to see who can offer the best operating system and platform capabilities. And this can only be good news for consumers who will benefit from the enhanced services that will become available!

The latest round in this escalating competition came from Research in Motion (RIM), who announced a new services platform at their developers conference. The new platform offers developers new capabilities in 4 main areas:

• The BlackBerry® Advertising Service will enable developers to integrate advertising into their BlackBerry applications. This will help them generate revenue as well as simplifying the business of mobile advertising. RIM plans to provide developers with access to a large pool of ad units from advertising networks such as Jumptap, Lat49, Millennial Media, Navteq, 1020 Placecast, Quattro Wireless and Sympatico.ca.
• The BlackBerry® Payment Service from RIM will give Blackberry developers the ability generate extra revenue from their applications by easily implementing a variety of charging mechanisms. These include one-time sale of content, monthly or annual subscriptions, and upgrades or additional level sales for games or entertainment applications.
• The BlackBerry® Push Service allows developers or content providers to deliver time sensitive alerts and up to 8KB of data to applications that are installed on a Blackberry. This can make applications much more interactive, and a great way for brands to communicate with consumers. To date this service has only been available to a premium level of developer, but it will now be opened up to all Blackberry developers.
• Three additional Location Services will also be released:
  • Reverse Geocoding – is a new service that converts geolocation coordinates to a specific address
  • Cell site geolocation is a new service that will provide developers with an alternative to GPS, providing an estimate of a smartphone’s location based on cell tower triangulation. Cell site geolocation is generally faster than GPS, uses less battery power (which makes it ideal for applications that run in the background while multi-tasking), and is ideal for indoor use where the line-of-sight to satellites required by GPS receivers is not always available.
  • Travel Time – this new service will allow developers to incorporate estimated travel time within their applications for almost any destination in the US and Canada. The travel time calculations will be based on distance, speed limits and aggregated traffic conditions.

  RIM says that these new features will become available in early to mid-2010.