VoIP and social network startup Jaxtr Inc. has laid off 14 of its employees including chief executive has stepped down. Interim CEO Bahman Koohestani said former chief excutive Konstantin Guericke is stepping down to spend more time with his wife and two young daughters. However, Konstantin will remain as chairman of the company. With the layoffs, the company now has about 30 employees.

Jaxtr Inc. has raised $10 million to expand its Web-based service that allow users to make less expensive long-distance calls. It’s the second round of funding for the Menlo Park-based company, and was led by Lehman Brothers Venture Partners. The round brings the company’s total raised to $20 million.

The service has registered more than 10 million users in 220 countries, said Chief Executive Officer Konstantin Guericke, who said jjaxtr has spent no money on advertising. Guericke was the co-founder and CEO of Mountain View-based social networking site LinkedIn, which raised $53 million and was valued at $1 billion on June 17.

Guericke said he thinks jaxtr has gained traction because it lets users talk through phones instead of through their computers, like many of its competitors in the voice-over-IP market. VoIP allows consumers to use broadband connections to talk more cheaply than with traditional phone service or calling cards.

The company’s service generates local numbers for users to call with their phones, eliminating long-distance and international charges, Guericke said. Users must be registered with jaxtr to receive calls, but consumers don’t have to register with jaxtr to call the service’s customers for free.

Jaxtr has several revenue streams: fees for phone minutes, advertising on its Web site, and advertising on free text messages. Users get free minutes for referrals and for activity on the site but pay 1 cent to 6 cents a minute for additional calls.

Internet telephony service Jactr lets you add a widget to your web site that lets visitors contact you over the phone. Now Jastr is launching a new service that routes telephone calls over the internet whether you’re taking the time to click a button on a web site or not.

Here’s how it works. When someone views your Jaxtrr profile, they can click a “Call Me” button. Jsxtr will then bring up a local phone number they can call. So if you’re in the US and the person who wants to call you is in China, they’ll get a Chinese phone number. Jaxtr makes the connection over the internet, but once you’ve got a number, you can use it any time you like. No computer necessary.

You can call other Jaxtr users for free, or purchase credits (called “Jax”) which you can use to make cheap long distance calls.

While it may be less widely appreciated when compared to Jajah, the Jaxtr voip widget is a polished product. Not only can you embed the Jaxtr widget in your MySpace, Friendster, Blogger, LinkedIn profile to allow friends to call for cheap, but with Jaxtr you can also send SMS and receive voice messages. Calls to other Jaxtr users are free.

Using Jaxtr basic service is free at the moment. Jaxtr may charge from premium services for jaxtr power users. With jaxtr, you will bypass expensive international mobile roaming fees. Thus, you can call friends and family in other countries at the same cost and with the same convenience as calling a friend locally.

Jaxtr main objective is to link your phone to the web so that you can hear from callers anywhere in the world while keeping your existing phone number private.

Because of this unique linking designed, you do not need a headset and has no dialers to download. Jaxtr works with any phone including landline phones.