NewBay, a fast-growing Dublin, Ireland-based company that provides social networking, messaging and other services to wireless carriers, has chosen Seattle as its new headquarters for the Americas. The eight-year-old company, backed by Balderton Capital and Fidelity Growth Partners, said it picked Seattle because of the depth of technical talent and the region's historic strength in wireless.

"Seattle is the ‘mobile Silicon Valley,’ which made it the perfect location for our new Americas headquarters," said Timo Bauer, senior vice president and general manager at New Bay. "As we continue to grow our customer base, we will focus on recruiting new talent across multiple disciplines in Seattle including business development, marketing, finance, engineering, operations and professional services."

The company has already been experiencing a growth spurt in the U.S., doubling the employee count in the past year. It now employs 48 people in the U.S., with plans to add 100 more in the next 12 months.

NewBay's core offering is a product known as LifeCache, which allows mobile phone users to create, store and share digital content across a variety of connected devices. Its customers include AT&T, Verizon and U.S. Cellular. The company first established a presence in Bellevue four years ago in order to service T-Mobile, one of NewBay's key customers.

The new office is the latest shot in the arm for the state's economy, and it marks yet another technology company which has chosen the Seattle area for a branch office. Earlier this week, we broke the news that Salesforce.com planned to establish an engineering center in Seattle's South Lake Union neighborhood. An executive at the San Francisco tech giant said that the "sky is the limit" in terms of hiring in Seattle.

That followed announcements by Facebook, Hulu and Zynga -- all of which have decided to set up shop in Seattle in the past six months.

Together, these offices may not employ thousands of workers right off the bat. But it is worth noting that Google established a small engineering center in Kirkland in 2004, an operation which has now grown to more than 600 employees.

The timing of the new offices also is interesting given that some members of the Seattle technology community are fighting hard to defeat Initiative 1098, which would impose an income tax on those making more than $200,000. Opponents have argued that the tax -- which would help fund education measures -- would make it more difficult to attract technology businesses and high wage earners to the state.

NewBay is celebrating the opening of the Seattle operation today with a visit from Governor Chris Gregoire.