During his keynote presentation at the GITEX conference in Dubai, Research In Motion’s (RIM’s) co-CEO Jim Balsillie, unveiled a new way for BlackBerry smartphone users to connect with one another and share multimedia content.

As with the near field communication (NFC) abilities of Symbian Belle operating Nokia’s, BlackBerry Tag, will allow users to share contact information, documents, URLs, photos and other multimedia content by simply tapping their BlackBerry smartphones together.

This functionality will be part and partial of the next BlackBerry 7 OS update (no local release info available yet) and will also enable users to instantly add one another as contacts on BBM (BlackBerry Messenger).

BlackBerry Tag employs NFC technology that is featured in certain of the Canadian company’s new mobile devices such as the BlackBerry Bold 9900 and BlackBerry Curve 9360 smartphones. These will be amongst the first BlackBerry smartphones to support BlackBerry Tag.

RIM will make BlackBerry Tag available via APIs on the BlackBerry platform, allowing software developers to take advantage of the “tap to share” functionality from within their own applications.

“BlackBerry Tag is an exciting and innovative feature that makes sharing contact information and multimedia content effortless and seamless,” said Balsillie. “BlackBerry Tag opens a new dimension to the BlackBerry platform that is powerful, simple and intuitive and we think it will be welcomed by both users and developers.”  

In related news RIM also recently snapped up the Dublin-based social software company NewBay, which will enable it to boost its its cloud services.