Monday, August 6, 2007

Jaxtr - Voip with a twist


After my previous post on Rebtel and Jajah Megan commented telling me to check Jaxtr out. So I did that today.
Jaxtr is pretty cool and they do most of the things that Rebtel and Jajah does.
Jaxtr functionality as far as I've understood:
* People can call you for free or at local call rates from all over the world (or at least from 51 countries)
* Your friends get a local number to call you that they can dial on any ordinary phone.
* Some free minutes each month to be called by anyone (in my case, with a swedish cellphone, 6 minutes)
* Friends on some social networks as Facebook and MySpace can call you from the site directly, and still use their regular phone.
* Visitors on your blog can call you using a similar widget, and you never need to show your phone number to the world.

So far it all sounds great, but the service has some downsides as well:
* You "pay" with Jaxtr credits when you receive calls to a regular phone or mobile phone.
* You get Jaxtr credits from recruiting friends to the service, or by simply buying them. Right now the buying process isn't fullt functional and I couldn't find any rates specified anywhere.

The people over at Jaxtr has done a really good job to make widget integration on your social networks easy, and it is also very easy to invite friends from different sources (as gmail and hotmail). I'm a bit impressed of that functionality, if I ever started a voip company, I would definitely try to make inviting and social network integration as easy.

I also like the thought of being able to be reached by readers or visitors without having to give away my own phonenumber. Right now I couldn't find a timefilter for that service, which might be a problem if you have readers in another country, I don't think I'd be fun to talk to in the middle of the night. On their infopage they wrote about the timefilter, so I guess they'll implement that function soon.

What I don't like about Jaxtr is the payment plan. I don't want to be charged for receiving calls, since I can't really control how much I am called (ok, I can filter people and point my Jaxtr account to a voicemail, but I can't control how high demand it will be for calling me).
I also don't like it that the service only works for a limited amount of time each month, if I don't recruit new members or pay cash. If I put a widget up on my facebook or on my blog, I want to be certain that anyone can call through the whole month.

It's a cool service worth checking out, obviously I have. Rebtel and Jajah fit my needs better than Jaxtr, but Jaxtr's focus on their widgets makes it an interesting service to follow.

Or what about a merger between Rebtel and Jaxtr? That would be really interesting as well.

6 comments:

Linus Kendall said...

I agree with you that Jaxtr really have made a great effort in building widgets and kept their focus clear - though I sometimes feel that this has made their core product not as good as it could be (being that they instead make great widgets).

On a side-note it's funny to see how you've had all these companies active on your blog reading and commenting - I've seen Jaxtr (Megan), Rebtel (well me and Maja for example), Jajah etc.

-LInus

Mattias Aspelund said...

Right now I'm in the process of evaluating the services that I've written about on my blog, and I'll be posting a short "summary" of my experiences so far shortly.

Unfortunately one thing I'll write about is that I've received error messages when trying to install Rebtels Facebook widget. I know it's still in beta, but it's unfortunate that I'm unable to test that part.

alex de jong said...

We're now at august 20th and you really should have no troubel using the rebtel widget. On the other hand, do contact us if there is stuff we might help you with. We're a pretty accessible bunch, as you probably noticed : ) I've been using the rebtel FB app since august 14th and it's worked great for me.

Anonymous said...

I used jaxtr to make a call to India...the line was garbled and it wasn't a success. Within the US,there shouldn't be any problem I reckon.

asemzarin said...

Rebtel offers a rate of £0.039 to pakistan where jaxtr. Where jaxtr offers £0.057 plus a £0.01 charge for each call.

Does anyone know the cheapest rates to make direct calls (by dialling a local number) to pakistan.

If anyone does, could they email me at asemzarin@yahoo.co.uk

asemzarin said...

Rebtel offers a rate of £0.039 to pakistan where jaxtr. Where jaxtr offers £0.057 plus a £0.01 charge for each call.

Does anyone know the cheapest rates to make direct calls (by dialling a local number) to pakistan.

If anyone does, could they email me at asemzarin@yahoo.co.uk