The service provides local phone numbers that allow callers to eliminate expensive international long distance charges from any of 29 national markets in Europe, the Americas and Asia. Initial countries range from United States to most of Western Europe to Brazil, Chile and Mexico and Japan and Singapore.
The free jaxtr account links your mobile or landline phones with your online blog or social networking website. You add the jaxtr widget to your online profile or blog, which allows you to hear from callers worldwide while keeping their existing phone numbers private. Jaxtr does not charge users for unlimited outbound international calls from your mobile phone and also provides you with unlimited voice mails.
Jaxtr users can now receive calls from people in over 200 countries.
Jaxtr‘s PrivacyShield enables users to control on a caller-by-caller basis whether to block certain callers from getting through or even if they are allowed to leave a voice mail or not. They can also decide whether their home, work or mobile phone should ring when an approved person calls them. Jaxtr users also get access to visual voicemail, a Web-based application that enables them to review and manage voice messages just as with Web-based email accounts.
Callers can reach a jaxtr user without having a jaxtr account of their own. Once the first call is initiated, jaxtr provides the caller with a unique and permanent number, which they can use to call the same person in the future, even when neither person is online or even near their computer. Because the new number is typically local for the caller, he or she will be able to reach that jaxtr user without incurring long distance charges on both domestic and international calls – even when calling from a mobile phone.
How does this compare to other VoIP widgets like the GrandCentralweb button. Jaxtr is clearly aimed at the social networking market while GrandCentral's many robust features really serves the business market. But the one feature that really catches my attention is the free international calling. Domestically, GrandCentral serves my needs extremely well. But, on one truly international website I built for an exporting company, GrandCentral lacked international calling. The client didn't want to spring for an 800 number in an effort to keep costs down. Skype is used quite a lot overseas for business so this was incorporated into the site. The sound quality has so greatly improved in the latest release of Skype that headsets weren't neccessary. The shear volumn of the worldwide Skype community makes it a VoIP product that I use alot. But you are tied to a PC that must have Skype.