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Jaxtr now has a buck for every one of its users. The company has raised $10 million in a second round of financing to expand its cheap overseas internet calling business.

The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company uses a voice-over-internet-protocol service to knock the costs out of overseas calls. It can charge as little as 1 cent a minute for calls to China because of its unique system. It lets users advertise to an online community how they can be contacted via a widget they place on a blog or a social networking page.

A user puts the widget on a page, and a would-be caller clicks on the widget. The caller then enters his or her phone number on the widget and then clicks the “call me” button. Jaxtr figures out the location of the caller. Then it finds a local phone number to call the caller back. It gets the caller on the line and then proceeds to make a call to the user. No one realizes it’s actually a three-way connection. The caller is connected via a local phone call, the call itself is routed over the Internet to Jaxtr’s servers, and then the servers complete the call through a local call to the user who is being callled. The call goes through as a local call for a fraction of the cost of an overseas call. Every time the caller and user want to make a call across the same country lines, they use that same local phone number.

Konstantine Guericke, chief executive of Jaxtr, was also a cofounder of LinkedIn, the social networking company that recently raised $53 million at a $1 billion valuation. While his company isn’t that valuable yet, Guericke said he’s excited at the opportunity because overseas calling is a $60 billion business.

“I like to do new things, and I see the same kind of change happening here as when LinkedIn started four years ago,” he said.

We’ve noted how fast Jaxtr is growing in past stories. In contrast to Skype (which is projected to hit $500 million in revenues about five years after its launch), most of Jaxtr’s calls are phone-to-phone rather than PC-to-PC. Read the rest of this entry »

Updated

Jaxtr, a Silicon Valley company that offers Internet calling, is crowing about its growth rate. Five million people have used the service since it launched, up from half a million users in July, it says.

To be clear, this is not the same as its monthly active users, which the company didn’t disclose. So many users who experimented with the service once may be counted in its number, but may no longer be using the service.

Indeed, Jaxtr’s fiercest competitors, Jajah and Jangl, report growth too, but are vague with specifics.

Menlo Park, Calif.-based Jaxtr says its growth is evidence that it has a superior interface that helps drive adoption.

With Jaxtr, you sign up and get a URL link, then you send that link to a friend. They click on the link and enter their phone number. Then, their phone rings, your number rings, and the call connects. Jaxtr provides a local telephone number, so you can make calls overseas while paying domestic rates. You can also link all of your accounts to one number.

However, its competitors’ interfaces are — at least to us — also relatively easy to use.

To be frank, VoIP calling services still aren’t as intuitive as normal landline or mobile phone services, at least for most people. Mass distribution has not been easy for any of these startups.

The place where VoIP really stands out is when it is built into a more comprehensive suite of office communication services so you can easily record messages and store them with your email. Or, it can be used as a cheaper way to make international calls if you have friends and family overseas.

Jaxtr, Jajah and Jangl all offer widgets on social networks and other sites, in an effort to get the average Myspace or Hi5 user calling their friends on it. Jangl has cut business deals to make money: It provides anonymous calling services to dating sites like Match.com and the FriendFinder.com empire.

UPDATE: The company also says 45 percent of its users logged in to its site in the past 30 days — mostly to check voicemail. It also says most people make calls without going to the site, either through a widget or through their phone.

Jajah and Jangl may have sensed a shakeout among VoIP startups. They recently announced a strategic partnership, where Jajah will continue work in its calling infrastructure and Jangl will focus on building social web applications.

Still, Jaxtr claims to be growing so fast that it is facing scaling issues, necessitating more engineers. It recently poached Taneli Otala from MySQL, to be company’s new vice president of engineering.

Meanwhile, the other companies keep coming out with more features. Jangl now has an SMS service, for example.

Here’s a short video on how Jaxtr works.

Jaxtr, a service for dodging international calling fees using your phone, has raised $10 million in series A round led by August Capital.

It says it has doubled in size in the last month to a million users.

The Menlo Park, Calif. company (more detail from our past coverage here and here [update: first comment below]) allows you to make free phone calls over the web or your mobile and landline phones, including low local rates for international calls.

When you sign up and make your first call on the web, you get a unique Jaxtr phone number and web address, such as www.jaxtr.com/mattmarshall.

People who want to call you can simply click on the web address link and get directed to your current phone number, as you have it pre-selected on Jaxtr — without you having to reveal your real number.

The company also lets you embed its widget on web pages so you can make or receive calls, say, on your Myspace account; it also launched a Facebook app in late May, but it only has a little over 12,000 users three months later.

Jaxtr has between 70 and 80 percent of its total users making and receiving calls from mobile phones simply because a Jaxtr number can be entered into a mobile address book like any other number, chief executive Konstantin Guericke tells us.

While Skype, Jajah and other internet-based phone services also provide ways to make free international calls, Guericke says this alternative phone number is more convenient for mobile users because they don’t need to download a mobile application, like Skype, or access a web browser, like Jajah. It’s similar to GrandCentral, the company bought by Google, which provides a single number you can use anywhere — although it gives you a single URL instead.

Eighty percent of total Jaxtr users live in 220 countries outside of the US, although Guericke says US users are three times as active, overall.

More than 16,000 users are now registering per day, the company says, with nearly three quarters of users in their 20’s.

Jaxtr was almost acquired recently, Dave Hornik of August Capital tells us — from another private company headed to an IPO (but not Facebook), he says.

While the offer would have been a good return for Jaxtr and its investors, Guericke says Jaxtr took the funding to try to replace the multi-billion dollar industry of selling calling cards with minutes for making international calls.

Jaxtr plans to make money by charging people who use more than their allotted 100 minutes per month; he hopes to get 20 million users in the next twelve months and is planning for only around one percent of these users to pay for additional minutes.

Other returning investors include the Mayfield Fund, The Founder’s Fund and three early Skype backers: Draper Richards, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mangrove Capital.

Jaxtr, a way to bypass international calling fees using your phone, has gained over 500,000 registered users since it launched last December.

It is one of a group of fast growing companies that make Internet calls in a similar way. Jajah, another company that started earlier, and has more that 1 million. Rebtel is another player. Unlike these newbies, EBay’s Skype, a bigger, and more mature company, requires you to wear a headset to make calls.

Jaxtr, located in Menlo Park, Calif., says it has been doubling its number of registered users every month since March, when it began its public beta. An average of 10,000 members now joining per day.

When we reviewed the site in December, we noted how it did two things well — that now appear to be driving this growth.

One is that it lets you put a widget on any blog or site that people can use to put an internet-based call through to your phone, without giving out your number. You’ll only be charged for your local rates, per whatever plan you have for the land line or mobile line that you’re using. A caller types in their number, receives a call from Jaxtr then is put on hold while the system calls you. The other is that you get a single profile URL that people can reach you on even if you change phone numbers: You can put this in your email signature or other obvious location instead of a list of home, cell and office numbers.

Other features compliment the service, including a web-based voicemail system and email notification about voicemail.

The first 100 minutes per month are free — after that, calls go straight to voicemail and you pay to upgrade.

Besides international callers, core users include people on social networks, eBay sellers and real estate agents seeking to make their sites more personal.

There are plenty of Internet-based calling services out there, but chief executive Konstantin Guericke says Jaxtr gets rid of the inconvenience of headsets and software download (Skype) and the need to go the web to make calls (Jajah).

Jaxtr currently has local land-lines set up to handle the service in 52 countries and is doing well in major markets: 50 percent of all of its users live in the U.S., India and China. Apparently, it’s capturing the social-networking demographics, as some 70 percent of all Jaxtr users are in their 20s.

Investors include the Founders Fund, Draper Richards, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Mayfield Fund, and angel investors Reid Hoffman and Ron Conway

The latest action:

Cognition launches new search engine company — Cognition, of Santa Monica, Calif., is yet another company trying to understanding the meaning of words, to offer a better a search engine. But it looks somewhat quirky. It offers a search portal in the areas of health, politics and legal support. We tested it, using the words “knee pain,” but found the results less useful than those provided by Kosmix, Healthline and Medstory.

Its engine has been taught the meaning of 375,000 English words, so that if you use two or more words together, it hopes to make a better stab at what you mean than Google does. Previous efforts have been elusive until now, but new companies, Hakia (already launched) and Powerset (to launch later this year) are also trying. Cognition was founded by computational linguistics PhD, Kathleen Dahlgren. Its separate site, Coghog, was supposed to launch last year, but hasn’t. (More details here.) For now, it appears to want to serve corporate clients, in the area of legal support and healthcare.

Jaxtr announces other investors — The start-up, which offers you a unique URL, which people can click and have a call go through to you without even having your phone number, said it has raised $1.5 million. We reported on the company earlier, but new investors disclose Warren Packard, managing director at Draper Fisher Jurvetson; Ken Howery, managing partner at The Founders Fund; investor Ron Conway. Jaxtr wants to raise $10M more. It is offering more features, such as voice and text messages. The albatross around this company’s neck, however, is its limit of free incoming calls to 100 free minutes. Its target group of young women may balk at that. Note that DFJ’s Packard is also a backer of Snapvine, a voice player that has some overlap with Jaxtr.

TrustedID’s co-founder steps down — Speaking of DFJ, another of the venture capital firm’s companies, TrustedID is seeing some changes as it prepares to raise more money. The Redwood City, Calif. start-up offers a service that freezes your credit reports, so that fraudsters can’t open financial accounts under your name, but you have to pay $8 a month. Co-founder Omar Ahmad, former CIO for Napster, has stepped down as president, but retains a board seat. Chief executive Scott Mitic today tell us Ahmad stepped down because “he’s an idea guy,” preferring to work with start-ups in their earliest days. Mitic says the company is growing, but declined to say how many subscribers the company has. Ahmad launched the company, he told us at the time, because his brother-in-law was a victim of ID theft. As reported here (scroll down), the company received $5 million in funding from DFJ a year ago.

Get ready for Apple TV — Some are calling it “the network in disguise,” and it is apparently expected to begin shipping to stores this week

Google introduces Pay-Per-Action — In other words, advertisers can decide to pay a publisher only if a reader of the site does something like fill out a questionnaire. (Details here.)

Palm about to be sold, by this week? — Word of talks continue to leak, suggesting bankers trying to sell the company are trying their best to drum up offers. The maker of the Treo and other devices is likely to be acquired by Nokia, a private equity firm (or firms) or even Motorola, reports Unstrung. Rumored deal deadline: Thursday.

Updated

Free phone service Jaxtr finally launches today.

The Palo Alto start-up is another one of those free phone services, which along with Skype, Jajah and Grand Central is enough to send you into brain overload. Which one to use? Each one has its own tweak on the free Internet call, contact list and central control dashboard.

Jaxtr’s promise was enough to lure away Konstantin Guericke from LinkedIn, where he was co-founder. It begins in a closed testing phase, letting in people users on a case-by-case basis.

Jaxtr’s claim to fame is two-fold:

1) The first claim is that it lets you put a widget/sign up on any blog that lets people know how to reach you, but without giving out your number (see screenshot of orange widget on a MySpace profile below). They just click on the widget, and Jaxtr puts a call Internet through to you.

Let’s say you’re a young single gal, which is Jaxtr’s initial target group. If a suitor clicks on the widget button that says “call now,” Jaxtr asks for his phone number, and he types it in. Jaxtr calls his phone (mobile or fixed, it doesn’t matter), in order to connect him to an Internet line. It then puts him on hold while it puts the call through to you. (This may sound complicated, but we got used to do doing this on Jajah, which works similarly). Jaxtr lets you know whether he is “unknown,” or someone in your contact list. Jaxtr, via its dashboard, lets you save settings, so you can have calls from “unknown” or particular people diverted directly into your voicemail, and so on. (See the image at very bottom for a screen shot of the dashboard).

2. Jaxtr’s second claim to fame, however, is its single URL link. It lets you bag a link like www.jaxtr.com/mattmarshall (we haven’t registered it yet), which you can carry forever. This lets people reach you anytime, even if you change phone numbers. All they do is click on the link and they’ll be directed to your current phone number, as you have selected it on Jaxtr. Jaxtr also associates the URL with a single Jaxtr phone number. So when we used tested Jaxtr by calling Guericke, we saved his Jaxtr number in our contact list, and now we can call him, regardless of where he is in — in the office, or on his cell. If he is on the road, he can switch his settings to receive calls on his mobile, etc.

This single phone number handle/URL is what may propel Jaxtr to the top of the heap. However, like all new offerings, Jaxtr’s challenge will be to overcome the “laziness” factor. Who needs another number for their friends? But for those who make lots of international calls, it could be a big deal. We make such calls. We know someone in London who has refused to go to the trouble of downloading Jajah on her cell. Jaxtr, however, doesn’t require a download. Now she can call our Jaxtr number for free.

You get 100 minutes/month of free incoming calls. Beyond that, calls get forwarded to voicemail. You can pay to upgrade. Jaxtr also wants to charge for other services, such as ringback tones. Jaxtr has eight employees, and is self-funded [Clarification: Despite initially telling Venture Beat he hadn't raised money, Guericke clarified for VentureBeat Thursday that while Jaxtr has not raised a Series A, it has raised an angel round. He said his focus is on launching the company and showing some traction before going for a Series A. He said the investors so far include Reid Hoffman, The Founders Fund and Howard Hartenbaum, founding investor in Skype for Draper Richards. Also, Chamath Palihapitiya put in some money for Mayfield Fund. Thanks to Petr M in comments for helping ferret this out.]

Aside: So why did Guericke (pictured here) leave LinkedIn at time when LinkedIn chief executive Reid Hoffman is proclaiming the company has just reached its “tipping point”? Guericke said LinkedIn was challenge when it was a small start-up, but it is now profitable and well on its way, and he is looking to make more of an impact as chief executive of a start-up. Moreover, Guericke has vested his LinkedIn options, so he is not walking away empty-handed. Finally, he says Jaxtr is an example of a social networking “platform,” which he says is the way of the future.