Charge Anywhere Pioneers Blackberry NFC Payments

Among the many announcements to come out of Blackberry World today, mobile contactless technology had an undeniable, albeit not resoundingly huge, presence. One company that came out strong for the mobile payment side of things is Charge Anywhere, a startup that is looking to pioneer the way small businesses and individual consumers exchange money in real time. Today, it launched a mobile payment app for Blackberry.

The app turns Blackberry phones with Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, like the newest versions of the Blackberry Curve and the Blackberry Bold, into virtual credit card terminals. So if you're a small business owner and you want to accept credit card payments at the point of sale, all you need to do is open the app and tap the customer's credit card to your phone. This, of course, assumes that the credit card is also equipped with an NFC chip.

It is essentially like Square's mobile credit card reader, but without the need for a physical attachment to the phone. It's an interesting reversal for NFC technology, which has so far been mainly focused on turning smartphones into credit cards, no credit card acceptors. The company boasted that it is "the first Mobile Payment App provider to support NFC initiated credit and debit card payment acceptance on BlackBerry NFC enabled devices."