Jaxtr, the online VoIP service that also offers a social network, has launched out-of-network calling that will allow users to call phone lines around the world. The new service will allow users to call family and friends (even non-members) from their own phones for a fraction of the costs associated with traditional long distance calling. The company has also raised a $10 million Series B funding round led by Lehman Brothers Venture Partners.

To use the service, users need to enter each international number they’d like to call on the site, which generates a unique local number for every contact. From then on, they can simply call the number from their phone as they normally would. The initial setup seems like a bit of a hassle, but it is significantly easier than using a calling card every time you need to place a call. Rates vary by country, and are generally much cheaper than standard call fees (many also appear to be lower than those found on similar VoIP services).

The site is also introducing “Premium Memberships”, which offer digital voicemail through email and customized contact pages. These premium memberships are actually free, but are only granted to active members (the site declined to specify what exactly was needed to attain ‘active’ status). Members who don’t qualify as “active” should be able to purchase premium membership in the near future.

These new features, especially the out-of-network calls, make Jaxtr increasingly competitive with other VoIP operators like Jajah, which has a number of very similar features. And while there might not be much that differentiates the two companies from each other, it is important to note the massive market for international calls, which can certainly support more than a few similar services.

Jangl is finally turning on a revenue stream across its network of social calling widgets, which reach a potential 80 million social networking profiles (the company hasn’t announced actual active users). People generally use Jangl to place calls or SMSs to other web surfers without exchanging your real number. The new advertising initiative is called Mobile Media Platform and provides a set of APIs for publishers and ad units for advertisers. The strategy is similar to steps other widget providers have taken to finally make some money off their network by tying in advertisements.

Through the APIs, developers can integrate bits of Jangl’s SMS and VOIP calling functionality into their applications. In exchange, Jangl expands its advertising reach a bit further. The monetization side is being handled in partnership with Pudding Media, and Ogilvy’s Digital Innovation Group. Jangl will have several different types of ad units for advertisers, such as SMS ads tacked on to messages users send and pre-roll audio ads that play during the time you’d normally spend listening to the phone ring. Advertisers can target the ads by keyword, category, location, and demographics. Jangl’s been running tests of the SMS and pre-roll format on Facebook and Bebo with Pudding Media earlier this quarter and feels confident enough that they won’t turn users off to the service.

Social calling widget Jaxtr has just released a new destination called Jaxtr Cafe. Their widget, like Jangl’s, provides users with an anonymous number to call each other with the added bonus of cheaper long distance calling.

Up until now, Jaxtr users found each other more or less randomly on social networks of email signatures that listed links to the service. Jaxtr Cafe, however, is a social network of sorts where some 10 million users (50-60% active) of the service can find each other and carry on conversations about whatever they want. It also gives Jaxtr the opportunity to start monetizing their free service through advertising on the site. Jangl, on the other hand, has monetized on a case by case basis (rev share on Match.com, ads on PlentyOfFish).

Every user of Jaxtr is grandfathered in to Jaxtr Cafe’s profile database. You can search amongst these profiles based on interests and geography. For instance, if you want to talk to someone who’s an Australian and interested in food, you can easily do a search through the directory for just the right person. You can then call or text them using Jaxtr’s widget.

I was surprised no to see an offering closer to Ingenio’s Ether, but that may be an additional feature in the coming months. Rather the service seems a lot like Skype Live. However there’s the added advantage that while people aren’t always on Skype, but pretty much always have their phones. It does come at the cost of your local calling minutes, but you’ll wind up with a cheaper long distance chat.

When it comes to connecting with new friends safely and privately, Jangl fits the bill. The “Social Communications Widget” lets you make calls, send SMSs, and leave voice mails without exposing anyone’s phone number through a simple widget.

In contrast to their competitor, Jaxtr, they’ve been mainly spreading through a series of direct deals with social networking sites (Match.com, Tagged, AdultFriendFinder, and Fubar) and a Facebook/Bebo application (potentially on 80 million profiles). Jaxtr, on the other hand, has been spreading mainly through email links and personal websites (5 million users in under 5 months).

Now they’ve forged a deal to be featured on the maverick of dating sites, PlentyOfFish. PlentyOfFish is like every other dating site you’ve heard of, but free. Free has actually paid off pretty well for founder Markus Frind, who runs the site from his Vancouver apartment and takes in over $10 million a year in advertising.

Comscore ranked the site the number one dating site in December 2007, with an average of 1.3 billion page views a month (70,000 sessions and 3 million page views an hour).

Jangl’s widget will let daters call each other, send SMSs, and leave voice mails all without sharing a real number. The functionality makes it easy to take the next step in a relationship without sacrificing privacy, or just discreet phone sex. Calls will be terminated on Jajah’s servers as part of their existing relationship. Like PlentyOfFish itself, Jangl will be monetizing the service through text advertising; a first for the company. On other sites, the service is either ad-free or paid for as part of membership (match.com).

I’ve found social calling widgets (particularly Jaxtr and Jangl) to be the most attractive part of the VOIP market because they’re not competing in a race to the lowest calling rates, but adding real utility to our existing phone lines. Other voice widgets include Ccube, Tringme, and Snapvine. While monetization is still somewhat up in the air, both companies are testing out business models (paid Jaxtr minutes, or Jangl’s revenue sharing). Going forward we’ll see which models do and don’t work. I also expect both companies to continue adopting more advanced features similar to Google’s GrandCentral.

Social communications startup Jaxtr has been experiencing some pretty amazing growth. They’ve attracted over 5 million users in under 5 months (140 days). It’s a ten fold increase in users since they reported 500,000 users in July. Jaxtr attributes a lot of the growth to the utility of the product and virality of calling links placed in emails.

In August, Jaxtr reported 1 million users and $10 million in financing. In response to the growth, they’ve brought on Taneli Otala as VP of engineering, the former CTO of MySQL.

It’s hard to compare these new numbers with Jaxtr’s main competition, newly partnered Jangl and Jajah, because Jangl has only reported numbers about their potential reach. These numbers highlight deals with websites such as Match.com or Tagged (which reaches 40 million profiles). Jajah recently crossed over 2 million users.

Jaxtr offers a really comprehensive calling system. It lets people call you anonymously online through a widget or unique Jaxtr phone number that connects to your real number. Similar to Jangl, Jaxtr adds a host of advanced features such as call screening and voicemail, all without giving away your original phone number. They’ve also built out more functionality similar to GrandCentral. Users can link multiple phones to their account, and forward certain phone numbers directly to voicemail.

Jaxtr CEO Konstantin Guericke says about 85% of their users are international, with the other 15% based in North America. This makes sense because one of most direct benefits of VOIP systems like Jaxtr is the long distance cost savings to over 220 countries. VOIP calls save money on long distance calling by connecting calls over internet lines instead of more expensive standard phone lines.

Jaxtr users have 100 free minutes to use per month, however calls to other Jaxtr users don’t use these minutes. Jaxtr plans on monetizing by letting users buy more minutes and running advertising on the web pages of free accounts in the future.

Nearly every VOIP related startup has their own click-to-call widget, Jajah, Jangl, Jaxtr, and even GrandCentral. These widgets let you easily and sometimes anonymously set up a call with friends over the web. They’re very useful and come packed with features like voicemail and texting. However, each of these services connects phones to phones, which still eats away at your mobile minutes while you’re talking to that business contact or MySpace hottie.

TringMe offers a bit more flexibility. Callers can ditch their phone and call directly through their Flash widget to your mobile phone, landline, and GTalk (Yahoo and Skype coming soon). All they need is a microphone and one click. Although they’re still in private beta, you can try the demo widget to the right for an idea of the experience.

Similar to the other services, your phone number is kept private and the calls are free (now’s the time for that overseas call). You can also set the widget to just receive voicemails, which are emailed to you, saved on your standard mailbox, or recorded and played back in GTalk. There is one major drawback, though. Since there is no virtual phone number involved, callers have to be at a computer and can’t call you while they’re on the go.

Naturally such an easy and anonymous calling service is susceptible to abuse, and I don’t see any countermeasures in place to keep out prank calls and telemarketers. The other services have verified phone numbers and white/black lists to keep abuse to a minimum. I expect TringMe will have to incorporate similar controls to make people more comfortable with using the widget.

Jajah will be officially announcing their click-to-call buttons on Monday. The buttons, which let people call the owner for free and anonymously, have been quietly in private beta over the past year. They are also taking on international calling card services and Jaxtr and Jangl, who already have click-to-call offerings on social networks and dating sites.

The call buttons are available to registered Jajah users and come as a bit of embed code you can put on your web page or at the end of an email. They come with several customizations. You can adjust the CSS styling, adjust the number it calls, and restrict which countries can try to call you.

When users click the button, the caller enters their phone number and Jajah connects the two parties over a VOIP line. The callee is then told who called and asked if they want to accept the call, say they’re busy, or blacklist the number. If they accept the call, the minutes are charged to their Jajah account, like an “800 number”. At two to three cents per minute, it can be used for some cheap long distance calling. For the cost conscious, Jaxtr and Jangl are still free, however.

Online voice messaging service Snapvine has raised a $10 million round led by Bridgescale Partners, a new Silicon Valley firm. This is on top of a $2 million round they raised back in last year from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, First Round Capital, and Russell Siegelman.

Snapvine makes a widget that lets you leave voice comments for friends and is one of the many competing online voicemail widgets. The service has also been used to connect celebrities and fans, similar to SayNow, which closed a $7.5 million series A at the end of August. There are many other voice messaging services out there that offer more utility, including Jangl and Jaxtr, which offer cheaper anonymous phone calls on top of voice messaging. Jangl has recently gotten access to millions of users as a widget on Tagged’s homepages and Jaxtr has over a million registered users. Snapvine reports that their application has been installed on five million user profiles across the various social networking sites.

Jaxtr has raised a $10 million Series A round led by August Capital with Mayfield Fund, Draper Richards, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Luxemburg-based Mangrove Capital participating. They’ve also doubled their registered user base over last month, totalling 1 million users. They plan on getting to a break even point on the investment and to total 20 million users by the end of next year.

Jaxtr, like GrandCentral, uses VOIP as a utility to add features to your existing phone. Many other other VOIP startups focus primarily on cost savings (We have a roundup of VOIP services here). It’s service lets you anonymously post your phone number on the web and get cheap long distance calling rates. It works by connecting calls to your existing phone service through a Jaxtr number on VOIP. Calls are anonymous because they are made to a new Jaxtr number instead of your existing number. This lets you push all calls to voicemail and choose who can and can’t call through directly. Calls are cheaper because long distance calls are made over VOIP lines instead of standard phone networks. Jangl is another player in the category, also enabling you to control access to who calls your phone.

Although you can access the service easily through an embeddable widget, Jaxtr has found a lot of its growth coming from direct call links placed in emails or on non-social networking websites. Jangl has been expanding through a series of business deals, most notably with Various, Inc, Justin.tv, Fubar, and Revision3, bringing their online profile presence to over 20 million.

As part of taking the company to a break even point, they will be releasing a paid service, incorporating advertising, and pursuing new services on social networks (TBA). The paid service is expected to be their lead revenue generator, with the first paid component simply allowing people to buy more Jax, the virtual currency that converts into local phone minutes. Currently users get 100 free Jax each month, which convert into 100 minutes in the US, with conversion rates depending on local telco costs (sometimes as low as 15 minutes in Europe). Longer term plans include tiered monthly minute plans, like cell phones.

Their second revenue stream will be through on-site advertising within user’s Jaxtr accounts. A look at their Alexa traffic shows traffic growing noticeably upward in fits and spurts, mostly due to users checking their Jaxtr voicemail. Although the company currently isn’t disclosing traffic numbers, Konstantine doesn’t dispute the Alexa numbers. He explains the dips as periods during which they had trouble keeping up with the growth.

VOIP calling service Jaxtr just celebrated doubling their previous number of registered users to in the past 27 days, totaling 500,000 users. Jaxtr doubled its membership since launch back in March, now adding over 12,000 users a day. More than 800,000 people have used the service to make calls since they launched.

Jaxtr isn’t like other VOIP companies which seek to replace your current phone. It’s a phone service intended to connect you with acquaintances cheaply over a VOIP line without giving up your phone number. It’s similar to Jangl. They have an embeddable widget we’ve written about before, so you think they would be big on social networks. However, over half of their growth comes from sources outside of social networks like Facebook and MySpace. For the record, though, Facebook and their new platform has been growing better than MySpace.

CEO Konstantin Guericke cites the greatest growth for Jaxtr came from blogs and a call me link placed in people’s email signature. The viral nature of an email signature turned out to be a good method of spreading the service. Business users tend not to be signed on to social networks all day, but instead send a lot of emails where having a generic method of fielding calls from strangers makes sense.

International expansion has also been important to Jaxtr. Half of their users live in either the US, India, or China. The other half live in the rest of the 52 countries they cover. Eighteen of those were announced today.

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.

A company called jaxtr, which launches in private beta today, allows users to connect their personal phone to their digital personality.

Jaxr is a widget that users can put into their social networking sites or blogs. When someone has a jaxtr widget, it means you can call them in real-time. Jaxtr members assign a specific number to their widget.

When a caller sees that widget, they can click it and jaxtr will ask them for their own phone number. The caller’s phone will ring, and when the caller picks up, jaxtr will ring the recipient who originated the widget. If the recipient was not available, jaxtr will notify them that they have a voicemail that they can access by calling into their jaxtr service.

Fortunately, 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. The service is free but local phone rates apply.

With the launch of jaxtr’s beta, the company also announced that LinkedIn co-founder Konstantin Guericke has joined the company as chief executive officer.

“There is nothing less satisfying than creating a social network page or blog and not getting a response,” said Guericke. “Social networks are a catalyst for people to meet, and jaxtr ‘jacks up’ the power of networks to help users make new connections. By putting a widget on their social network page or blog, jaxtr users can hear from callers worldwide on their existing landline or mobile phone.”

I have to say, I don’t always find it unsatisfying to blog and not get a response. There are several responses to my posts that I could certainly live without. But I can see the value of phone calls within social networking – especially considering how much of a meat market MySpace can be.

To request a beta membership, visit jaxtr’s Web site, which goes live on Thursday morning.

There are lots of competitors in this space, of course. We wrote about a few of them here.