I had the pleasure to be at JPMorgan's 33rd Annual Technology Conference here in San Francisco last Thursday. The conference is designed to help analysts and press people to better understand what public companies do and how their strategy will turn into better profits and revenues.

Each company has a 45 minutes pitch incl. Q&A with the audience. The cr�me de la cr�me of NASDAQ was there and some selected private companies that might be ready to go public soon. Each presentation was usually held by the company's CFO or CEO. So a bunch of smart business people in there.

The highlight on Thursday was surely to listen to Netflix' CFO. He responded with wit and humor to many questions about Blockbuster, Wal-Mart and VOD competitors like cinemanow.com. He was able to turn the overall skeptic mood in the auditorium into new believers into the Netflix stock it seemed.

Amazing from another standpoint was Net2Phone's presentation. The company is the VOIP pioneer. They have marketed a soft phone solution since 1995. It enabled free calls on the net itself and charged calls outbound to the public telephone network. The company makes a respectable 80 million in revenues - so far so good. But the company has never made a profit since this time (!). It has recently decided to abandon the consumer business (as it never turns real profit they say) and discovered to sell their solution to business customers i.e. middle tier cable providers who want to provide VOIP to their customers. Also they have raised for this new business sector another 100 million although they could never show they are able to run turn their technology into a profitable business. Revenues are expected to stay stable over the years (no real growth).

They story raises two questions for me: a) How can a company so unsuccessful for years raise that much money without real hassle? b) What does their hard work in the VOIP consumer sector tell us about the new entrants like Skype and the like? Skype works on a thinner infrastructure than net2phone but still needs to provide a lot of services for nothing and depends on rather slow growing conversion.