Jaxtr Growth Dwarves Skype

Free phone call service Jaxtr claims to have signed up 5 million members -- a ten-fold increase from 500,000 members just 140 days ago. Jaxtr suggests this growth rate is much higher than other fast-growth web technologies like Skype or ICQ.

Jaxtr provides an interesting model, giving you a way to make and receive international phone calls, voice and text messages for free using a points system called Jax. Currently, one Jax equals one minute of calling time.

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I'm a little surprised by Jaxtr's growth claims, as I don't know anyone who is actually using Jaxtr, and I'm run with a fairly tech-savvy crowd. I will say this; I went to sign-up today, and found that I already had an account! Apparently, I signed up back in August when I first heard about Jaxtr, but never used the product! I wonder how many of the 5 million accounts were actively used... EVER!

While Alexa tends to return skewed results, I ran a quick graph to compare traffic on the Jaxtr and Skype websites. While not an accurate measure of usage (you don't need to use either website to use their respective products) it should provide a reasonable representation of the "buzz factor."



As you can see, Jaxtr has seen considerable grown in traffic this year, while Skype has been relatively steady or even dipping slightly.

How is Jaxtr dealing with its growing pains? Jaxtr is hiring Taneli Otala as its vice president of engineering. He is a former technology chief at Various Inc, owner of the sex match-making site AdultFriendFinder.com that boasts 24 million members. The Finnish database expert was previously chief technology officer at MySQL, whose database software runs many of the most heavily trafficked sites on the Web.

So I've signed up for Jaxtr. Give me a call or leave me a message and let me know what you think of Jaxtr.