• December 11, 2007

Jaxtr has reached the five million registered member mark--a 10-fold increase from its base of 500,000 members in July. And the Menlo Park, Calif.-based VoIP provider announced that it has appointed Taneli Otala to the position of vice president of engineering, as part of a plan to support its phenomenal growth.

Without downloading an application, mobile phone users can use their domestic minutes to make international calls via jaxtr's technology. After signing up with jaxtr, members get listed in the jaxtr database, where friends and other contacts can find them. Contacts click the "call me free" button, give jaxtr their number, and then the service calls them and connects them with their friend.

Jaxtr members get up to 100 minutes worth of free incoming calls. Once users hit the maximum, their calls are directed to a jaxtr voice mailbox, and they can resume receiving calls when their free minutes are renewed each month.

Jaxtr is available in 220 countries, and some 32,000 new members have signed up each day for the past 140 days. The company has hired Otala, who most recently served as vice president of technology at Various (and CTO of MySQL prior to that) to handle the challenges that come with scaling out systems to meet such high demand.

--Tameka Kee