At this time last year, Twango co-founder Serena Glover was operating the tiny mobile photo and video sharing startup from her Redmond home's basement.

Today, she is overseeing a critical media unit of the Finnish phone giant Nokia, one that is expanding rapidly in the Seattle area. Nokia, which acquired 10-person Twango last summer in a deal of undisclosed size, plans to open a new facility in Kirkland this summer with room to accommodate 125 workers.

Serena Glover

Nokia's hiring spree has already kicked into gear, with 51 employees at temporary offices in Bellevue. The plan is to nearly double that number by the end of this year.

For Glover -- who calls the past 10 months a "wild ride" -- the expansion comes in stark contrast to running a self-funded startup in the basement. Staying there wasn't an option after Nokia came calling.

"Nokia kind of overran my house," says Glover, who, along with former Microsoft colleagues, founded Twango in 2004. "By the time we got out of there it was the basement, the living room, the family room, the kitchen. Every corner of my house had Nokia people in it. It was a very fun time, but it was time for us to move out and get bigger digs."

Those digs -- located next door to Google and Bungie Studios in Kirkland -- represent an important location in Nokia's efforts to help people share photos, videos and other content on mobile devices.

With about 200 million camera phones sold last year, Nokia is now the largest camera maker in the world. It also ships more than 1.5 million phones each day.

But less than 10 percent of the photos that people snap on their mobile devices ever make it to any place where friends or family can easily view them.

Glover and her team are attempting to address that problem, an opportunity that she says is so "massive" that it has attracted dozens of potential competitors. (Locally, Ontela and Dashwire -- both of which have been in the news recently-- also offer services to manage data on mobile phones.)

While plenty of competition exists, Glover believes that Nokia is in a unique position to help connect Internet services with mobile devices.

"We have an opportunity here to create a whole new experience on the Web in terms of media and social networking," said Glover, who serves as director of communities at Nokia. "No one has really nailed that yet, especially in the mobile space specifically."

Because of that opportunity, Glover said it has been relatively easy to attract talent here. She does worry about ramping too fast, but the opportunity does warrant fast growth.

So what are the folks at Nokia cooking up on the Eastside?

Glover said they are working mostly on digital media offerings -- music, video, mapping -- that will work with Nokia's Ovi online service.

For example, she said the company is working on a technology that would allow owners of GPS phones to see the location of friends and view the photos and videos they are producing, based on their location. That service would have been handy at a recent conference in Las Vegas, where Glover said she wanted to see photos produced by her other friends in attendance.

The goal at Nokia is to combine its music, mapping, games and messaging businesses in interesting mashups.

Nokia is committed to creating an open system, no matter the cellular provider or device. That could anger some of Nokia's carrier partners, but Glover said discussions with them have been positive. She said the "pie is getting bigger" as it relates to mobile services.

"The whole notion of connecting people means that you have to be open because the minute you starting thinking about what device they're on or what service they are on or what operator they are using, it becomes very, very difficult for people to connect," she said.