Research In Motion has unveiled its new services platform for developers offering advertising, payment, content push and location features.

The news, announced just now at the BlackBerry Developers Conference in San Francisco, is a significant step up in what’s available for developers creating apps for the BlackBerry App World store.

The BlackBerry Advertising Service will provide developers with ad units from a group of mobile ad networks, including Jumptap, Lat49, Millennial Media, Navteq, 1020 Placecast, Quattro Wireless and Sympatico.ca.

It includes regular text and banner ads, as well as rich media ads designed to sit within BlackBerry apps. The latter will let adverts launch voice calls, add calendar and contact entries to the handset, or link directly to an app in the App World. Analytics are included.

However, RIM hasn’t announced whether the service – which will go live in the first half of next year, will preclude developers from using ad units from other networks – AdMob and Greystripe, to name but two firms who are active in the iPhone space.

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Meanwhile, RIM is also launching the BlackBerry Payment Service, which will offer similar features to Apple’s in-app payments API. Developers will be able to sell digital content within apps, as well as monthly and annual subscriptions. However, the new service won’t be available until mid 2010 – a full year after the iPhone 3.0 SDK introduced the feature.

The third plank in RIM’s new services platform is BlackBerry Push Service, which is also due to go live in the first half of next year. It’s already being used by developers who are members of the BlackBerry Alliance Program, and lets developers push alerts and up to 8KB of data to BlackBerry apps.

Finally, RIM is rolling out three new location services for BlackBerry app developers: cell site geolocation, reverse geocoding and travel time. The first lets developers grab users’ locations in a faster, less battery-sucking way than GPS, which RIM says is ideal for apps (for example social location services) designed to run in the background.

Meanwhile, reverse geocoding will convert geolocation co-ordinates to specific addresses for use in BlackBerry apps. Both of these will require the BlackBerry OS 5.0 to work, and will be available to developers in the first half of next year.

Finally, Travel Time is an API call allowing developers to incorporate estimated travel time in their apps – but only for destinations in the US and Canada. It too will be available to developers in the first half of next year.

All of these improvements are great news for BlackBerry developers, although it should be noted they will take time to roll out.

By next summer, BlackBerry will offer features comparable to the iPhone 3.0 software for developers to make use of. The only question is whether Apple will also have moved on by then.

For full coverage of the RIM keynotes from today's conference, read our liveblog.