There’s a new mobile company in town—Dublin, Ireland-based NewBay Software, which is celebrating the opening of its new U.S. headquarters in Seattle today. The firm says it chose Seattle for its Americas headquarters because of the unique mobile and technological ecosystem here in the Pacific Northwest.
NewBay, founded in 2002, sits in a tech sector reminiscent of ventures like Mozy and Ontela (now Photobucket)—except the technology is geared more toward the service provider than the consumer. The company provides social networking, digital media, and cloud-based services to wireless service providers around the world. Some of its biggest clients include Alltel, Telstra, Orange, LG, and, in the U.S., AT&T, and T-Mobile. Its primary service—called LifeCache—gives mobile operators a way to offer consumers the ability to create, view, store, and share rich media across a number of digital devices.
Newbay, which currently has 250 employees spread across the U.S., Ireland, England, Germany, and Korea, says the Seattle office is part of the company’s international expansion plans. According to senior vice president and general manager of the Americas, Timo Bauer, the company has more than doubled its U.S. staff over the last year—to 48—and plans to aggressively hire an additional 100 employees over the next 12 months in Seattle.
Yesterday I caught up with Bauer, who talked about the company’s plans, and its decision to expand and bring 100 new mobile jobs to Seattle. Bauer is excited to be in Seattle for both business and personal reasons. “Given the depth of tech talent and innovation here, it will also be a great place to spearhead NewBay’s continued growth and success,” he said, adding, “I am from Northern Germany, and the weather is much worse over there, so I am quite happy with Seattle.”
Here are the highlights of our e-mail interview, edited for length and clarity:
Xconomy: What is the idea behind NewBay’s technology?
Timo Bauer: NewBay provides a cloud-based user content ecosystem to service providers and OEMs [original equipment manufacturers]. Our white-label platform is called LifeCache, and it enables our customers to offer user content solutions including social networking, digital vaults, network address books, notifications and messaging services. [Editor’s Note: Basically NewBay sells technology to wireless carriers that allow their customers to interact with digital media across devices, such as from mobile phone to desktop computer.]
We are enabling our customers to properly compete and partner with the likes of Google, Facebook, and Apple.
We have achieved great traction to date with our LifeCache platform and have four of the five top operators in the U.S. and Europe—as well as four of the top five global OEMs—using the technology today.
We believe that service providers—specifically the operators—play a crucial role in powering their subscribers’ digital lifestyle. Our mission is to help our customers to enable their subscribers with a rich digital lifestyle experience based on our LifeCache platform.
X: How does NewBay’s technology compare to that of related companies like Mozy and Ontela/Photobucket?
TB: EMC/Mozy and now Ontela/Photobucket are services that provide only very specific use
