April 16, 2008 at 9:48 am · Authored by Ewan · Filed under SMS

Jaxtr has launched free SMS to 38 odd countries (so reports Mashable). Pretty neat. They’re one to watch, Jaxtr, particularly as LinkedIn co-founder Konstantin Guericke is at the helm. 10 million members across 220 countries and counting.

Jaxtr originally enabled its users to receive calls from people visiting their social networking profiles — and it’s morphed to become, effectively, a RebTel-style service, giving users in different countries the ability to talk to each other via permanent local numbers.

I particularly like their VoiceBlast system — check it out on Konstantine’s page — the moment you visit, his audio message starts to play.

The Jaxtr widget is smart, too. You can call, text, ping or VoiceBlast. You just click on the relevant button — e.g. Text Me — and up pops a message window like so:

So free SMS to 38 countries. I logged in and had a play. Each message is limited to 65 characters in length, to enable Jaxtr to add content to the end of the message. In the example I tried, there was no advert — instead there was a mobile web link to allow me to easily reply to the text via Frengo.