We wrote about Jaxtr in December when it launched its private beta. Like many of the consumer facing VOIP startups that popped up last year, they are helping people make calls from one normal phone to another, with their service in between.
Now, normal phones are perfectly capable of calling normal phones already. What Jaxtr and others do is allow the call to be initiated from a website. Also, both parties are called from Jaxtr, so there are no call tolls. And phone numbers are not communicated to either party.
Jaxtr users place a widget on their website (ours is above). Others can then call the user by entering their own phone number. The caller’s phone rings, and then the other party’s phone rings. Then you have a phone conversation. Jaxtr also allows people to send the publisher a text message or just send them a voicemail directly (text messages and voicemails are administered on the Jaxtr site, not on your phone). Jaxtr never discloses the call recipient’s phone number so you can install a widget without ever exposing personal information. Users can also block callers or specify on a per-caller basis which callers can reach them live and which get routed to voice mail.
Jaxtr is a free service but has some limitations. Currently, users can receive 100 minutes of calls per month. After the limit is reached, calls are routed to the voicemail service instead.
After a first call is successfully initiated, Jaxtr provides the caller with a unique, permanent number, which they can use to call the same person in the future. Local toll rates apply, of course.
This isn’t a useful way for larger sites to communicate with users (I place the widget above with some trepidation), but it is a fantastic way for MySpace users with a small group of friends to stay in touch, and have phone conversations without giving out any personal information. It’s also a brilliant way for small businesses with a website to let their customers contact them.
Go crazy with the widget above.
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Very cool. Even more feautres than skype. But how many different widgets are we supposed to install on our desktops? I wish some one would integrate / put them in a capsule already and all I have to do is install the capsule with my fav. widgets already built in. I should be able to launch everything with single click and stop them the same way.
I like what this site / service is all about. It will be interesting to see if they are able to manage in the space. How long will it take for the premium “paid” service to kick into gear?
Michael,
As long as you keep the PrivacyShield on (and it is on by default), calls will get routed to jaxtr’s Web-based voice mail unless you specifically approve a caller to ring your phone. Also, there is no limit in terms of the number of inbound voice mails you can receive. If you run out of jax before we add 100 more jax to your account, then further calls will just be routed to your jaxtr voice mail box. In the US, 1 jax equals 1 minute of live talk time on landline or mobile phones. Or you can earn more jax to stock up your account if you run out. You get 20 jax per new user you sign up and who activates his/her phone. In the future, we’ll look at the option of buying jax with bucks or Euros
ahhh, the first few text messages are inspiring.
“bastard” was my favorite.
Mike, doesn’t your request not to be called from the widget imply something clearly negative about it? Is there a potential nuisance factor here, or what?
That’s awesome!
Seems like a great service for professionals on the go that use their site for lead generation like Realtors.
This is a service I will try out once the TC traffic dies down. Thanks Mike, its nice to have you writing a lot again.
how bout that Pandora spot? I love that service and don’t want to see it go away.
Anonymo - first, I changed the text and calls are now routed to voicemail. It reflects nothing more than my desire not to receive thousands of phone calls today.
Konstantin, thanks for the clarifications. I’ve updated the post to reflect your comments.
hornswaggled - great idea. I added something to the post about that.
I wonder if I should replace “contact us” page with this widget on my sites? What do you guys think?
Hi,
Looks like the credit is limitated to 10 min not to 100. At least in France
My first thought was dating websites. That was if the other person turns out to be crazy you have a buffer.
A lot of pretty nice uses for this, it’s pretty surprising how many people like you to be able to be contacted but won’t actually contact you. It’d definitely be worth trying ou for a while on just about any low-volume service website.
The other nice thing is that with a widget like this you can put it in an iframe, it doesn’t need access to the page itself, so it won’t delay rendering of the page like a lot of widgets.
Gonazgue,
I think we also allow users to run over some minutes on calls. Of course, if that gets abused, we will need to be stricter.
Everyone gets 100 free jax per month. In France, calls to mobile phones are 10 jax per minute, but calls to landline phones are 1 jax per minute. So, if you want to get 100 incoming call minutes per month, consider routing calls to your landline phone. Alternatively, we have a current promo for users with non-US mobile phones to earn “reward jax” by inviting others to jaxtr. Keep in mind that mobile calls to your friends don’t use up your own jax, but the jax of your friends, so you can call each of your friends until you use up their jax
I wonder how this compares with services like Estara (I cant think of their main competitor) as its free to start. I can see the blogging community embracing this along with the service professionals. Estara is stupid expensive for a small company to pay from what I remember.
Mike,
http://www.grandcentral.com/ let’s you do this as a part of their much larger offering.
You can see an (admittedly annoying) example on my website at http://david.ulevitch.com/
-david
ps: Glad you’re back in the editor seat full-time throttle.
I would start using Jaxtr today for a client but you cannot change the color as far as I can tell. Sorry that color scheme wont fly with A LOT of sites out there that care about aesthetics.
Some basic issues as I see them:
Cannot change the color of the widget
2 widget choices, basically extra large and large
Yes, I know. We’ll be working on enhancing our Customize tab. We figured we’d start by letting people customizing sounds/voice of their widget, but colors/photo are definitely important to many people. We also already offer a button option–making the whole widget smaller than the small version will make it pretty hard to use. We’ll be offering more button choices soon.
good feedback hornswaggled
Sounds similar to Yoo-Hoo run by Group2call.com, which is free. http://www.group2call.com/goyoohoo.aspx
“i like movies where animals talk.”
best text message so far.
I really hope our advertisers never learn who’s really reading this site.
Mike - how do you compare this to Sky-click which you wrote about last year? SC seems more robust for the business user, while this seems better for the blogger/myspacer.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006.....ens-today/
Except for keeping your number private, what is the point? Plus, if you are a business, you probably have your number listed anyway!
Yah - my thoughts exactly, David Ulevitch.
Here’s a link to the March 9th 2007 GrandCentral Blog announcement -
http://blog.grandcentral.com/?p=93
Nice and clean implementation, but you have to be tied in to a website to make a call.
http://connectmeanywhere.com/ has a much simpler model where you can create an address book of numbers you call from your mobile that get routed over a landline and IP. Simply match any number to a local number and pay much reduced rates. They’ve also got some very handy RSS reading and group messaging features.
Disclosure: the founders are friends.
Mike, re your response to my comment: You don’t want to receive thousands of calls today — that’s exactly my point. When would you ever want that? And who *ever* would? Even if the argument is that there are teens out there who love to stay connected, getting thousands of calls will quickly tire you out. Busy professionals? No way. And how many services out there already do voicemail? (I’m surprised no one on above has mentioned Snapvine.) Hey, I submit this all respectfully. Clearly a great job executing. But let me know if I am missing something, b/c I fail to see the differentiation (and the revenue model, by the way).
Mik,
While most of our users are using jaxtr for personal reasons, we have found that businesses like jaxtr especially when they do international business and they want to make it as easy as possible for their potential clients to get in touch with them. So, they don’t want to have to give out one more number in addition to the ones they already have, but they like how jaxtr gives each potential client a local number they can call. Your client in Tokyo gets a Tokyo number, and your client in Sydney gets a Sydney number.
Another thing that a phone number won’t do for you is to really grab the attention of someone visiting your page. Check out the following links of a Spanish divorce lawyer and a DJ of an Australian queer radio station who are using our VoiceBlast feature:
http://www.divorcio-separacion.com/?p=5
http://russellharrower.com/
I’m trying out the service myself and i have to say that so far i’m liking it. It has a smooth feel to it, but they do need to add more color choices to the widgets.
hornswaggled mentioned above that it offers only 2 widget choices. It’s actually 3, as they do have a simple “call me” button you can place on your site.
I don’t get it : “a fantastic way for MySpace users with a small group of friends to stay in touch and have phone conversations without giving out any personal information. ” — is that a real BIG problem?
Presumably if it’s a small group of friends that want to stay in touch, why wouldn’t they want to give our personal information?
If it’s a large group, you probably don’t want everyone to be calling you, so you shift to voicemail…
But then, how is this different from SnapVine? (another Draper investment)
I like the SMB play, but what’s the likelihood you can get SMB acquision moving on this? Despite all the click to call success, SMB adoption is really tough.
I don’t see the success of getting the MySpace crowd using this leading to SMB success.
I’ve been using jaxtr for a couple of months, saving a ton of money on calls to friends and family in Europe. Skype worked when we were at our desks, but being tethered to a computer was a pain. Once we all signed up for jaxtr, we were good to go. Now we call each other for free on our mobile phones even though we’re 5000 miles away. Great product!
Thanks for your response to my message, Mike. I appreciate the fact that in addition to readers listening (reading) to you, you also take the time to listen to you’re readers (and even respond to them.)
All I can say is, WoW.
[The WoW Starts Now
LOL
Of course, sadly this is “just another callback” service. It has a number of dependencies on the local carrier environment to make it useful for other markets like ours.
my cellphone (portuguese) is also limited to 10 monthly minutes.
it started as 100 and now it’s down to this….
Good to see you’re focussing on core markets and ignoring us boring ppl situated in Asia. We’d only clog up the system and demand multi-lingual support anyway..:(..or am i missing something?
I have been using Jaxtr and have found it a unique and valuable tool for my business. The support and ease of use is second to none and I couldn’t recommend it more. Try it and your hooked.
Between MeeboMe and Jaxtr, my blog’s left column will start looking like a widget expo. Still, I think it would be great as a customer support tool if I can figure out how to make it work in that fashion.
I am not able to register my UK based cell phone with jaxtr. The error message the comes back is not very useful either; it just says the this error could be because of various reasons eneter your number again. Is jaxtr not available on UK cell phones?
Hi Anand,
Just want to respond to you. We are having temporary problem with our providers terminating to UK. We should expect to get it fixed tomorrow.
We will notify you on this board when we fixed it.
Thanks
This is Darwin Ling. I am the Chief Voip Architect here at Jaxtr.
I am going to pop in and out this board from now on
Thanks
Hi Anand,
You should be able to activate your UK mobile phone now
Thanks
-Darwin
Hi Darwin,
Thanks a lot for all your help. This is a great service, maybe you guys should start charging for additional jax.
–anand
Hi Darwin,
Another suggestion would be to add a list of countries currently supported by jaxtr on your website.
I was trying to have someone call me from India using this and it did not work as you guys don’t have local numbers there.
Neat stuff though.
–anand
Has anyone tried the free call widget Thinking Voice offers on widgetbox (http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/thinkingVOICE-call-activator). While limited to calls in the US and Canada, they offer similar functionality without the 100 minute limit.
Anand,
Here is the entry on support across countries:
http://jaxtr.com/user/faq.jsp#11
We’ll be adding local numbers to a lot more countries over the next weeks/months. The regulatory environment in India is difficult. We welcome help from anybody who can get us local numbers we can own. Just send a message to http://www.jaxtr.com/phillip . . .
By trying to make it easier, they’re making it harder and more confusing. Skype works just fine, and I call call any cell or landline for about the same cost as this. Just a new company, with too many bells and whistles.
Regarding Jason……beclow:
Update your phone and you’re no longer tethered. Skype works on iPhone and others.
JasonM - March 20th, 2007 at 5:36 pm PDT
I’ve been using jaxtr for a couple of months, saving a ton of money on calls to friends and family in Europe. Skype worked when we were at our desks, but being tethered to a computer was a pain. Once we all signed up for jaxtr, we were good to go. Now we call each other for free on our mobile phones even though we’re 5000 miles away. Great product!