Red Herring Asia 100

100 innovative companies from Asia were selected to gather along with analysts, VCs and other entrepreneurs in Hong Kong last week, with an impressive 33 companies coming from China, many of them in the Internet space.

Judging from Red Herring’s CEO Alex Vieux’ introduction, Asia is red hot on innovation, with China being the most visible in the pack. Japan has its own world, with its stock markets, its VC firms and does not need to go global, Korea is pretty much the same, while India lacks a bit of a unified IT infrastructure – one drawback of democracy, one could say.

It comes back to KongZhong’s CEO Nick Yang comment during the Stanford ATI Conference: most Internet services would have a hard time going global as so much of what they do is local and needs constant tuning.

VC firms come in flocks to China might be because they are more impressed by its growth potential. But considering Japan’s leading SNS called Mixi (which is slicker than MySpace but not a marvel compated to South Korea’s Cyworld) is going to IPO this month with a valuation expected to reach $1bln (one billion US dollars – yes, about twice what Fox Interactive paid for MySpace…), does it really make sense to compete in China while Japan’s Internet space is still very much open? Of course there are a number of smart VC firms there, such as Softbank Ventures, Globis Capital Partners to name a few, but still…

Back to the conference, most companies from the Chinese Internet space already had closed their series A round and were set for a couple of years to grow user bases and sort out business models. It was fairly surprising to find very few Japanese and South Korean companies, considering their advance in fixed and wireless broadband. If little information filters from both countries, it is also true little enters them as well…

It would be difficult to comment on all companies, but here are a few gems:

- Cgogo: Chinese mobile search company. 200 people and lots of ambition. They will likely come to present at the next Mobile Monday Beijing on Sept 18.

- DaumSoft: Korean intelligent IM agent. What about adding Pizza Hutt in your MSN buddy list?

- Baihe: Largest Chinese “serious dating” site with over 5 million single members (and one of our consulting customers)

- Buzzcity: An Interesting Singapore-originated mobile community for emerging markets, with over 1mln users! Seemed to be a very sticky service.

- Gmedia: Chinese mobile 2D bar-code leader. The code looks a bit like Japan’s QR codes but the system and business model is closer to Korea’s Colorzip. Apparently on its way to become the de facto standard in China

- We@link: Chinese LinkedIn lookalike, with additional BBS features.

They could have avoided to knockout the look and feel of their inspiration, but it illustrates the fact that:

(1) “inspiration” from others is of the essence of the Internet (how many portals on the Internet are similar to Yahoo?)

(2) technical barriers are not high / technology is a commodity. Long gone are the days where web developers were a scarce resource AND only located in the US.
(3) innovation comes from improvement based on local users’ behaviours (Chinese users are very used to BBS / forums and LinkedIn totally lacked this feature)

(4) There is a lot of room for improvement for services and benchmarking other countries and services can save time, money, and give an edge on competitors. Since most companies are not cash-stricken, innovation is the only way out to the top. Interestingly, it happens to be exactly the type of service we provide ;-)

It was also the opportunity to meet with a number of personalities in the mobile and Internet space., a number of them being based in Beijing. As often, it is easier to meet elsewhere…

An article about the event: Japanese entrepreneurship
For Japanese readers, Masashi Kobayashi from the Japanese VC firm Globis Capital Partners posted his comments and some videos of the event (awards, day 2, day 3, conclusion).

Maybe there will be room for us to participate in a panel next year ^_^