It was the first day of Red Herring 100 Asia and Alex Vieux, CEO of RH announced the 100 winners. Alex also gave a good introduction on entrepreneurship with an excellent message to those entrepreneurs out there, perseverance. He went on to mentioned that Asia is the hot spot on the globe now. This is good news for entrepreneurs here and others looking into making it on their own.

As for the event itself, the turnout for the awards ceremony was a good one, compared to the other conferences I’ve been to in HK. The turnout should get better with the keynotes and roundtable sessions from analysts, VCs, CEOs, and previous winners coming tomorrow and Friday.

It’s a long list of winners and most were from China, South Korea and India. Hong Kong did make an appearance on stage, with three winners, Green Tomato, New Digital Noise, Recruit.net and EditGrid from Team and Concepts.

Here’s a partial list of the winners from the Internet/Services sector:

• Acanettv
• Ascent Networks
• Chinese All
• ComiAsia
• CTS Media IT
• Downjoy
• Hoodong.com
• iPart
• Mocre
• NVLsoft
• Pandora TV
• PeaceSoft Solutions
• Regalix
• Roboo
• Saora
• SM Onyomo Infotech
• Somode Holding
• TNC
• UCC Community
• Youku.com
• Zhanzuo

Congratulations also goes out to the other winners from the different sectors.

There was disappointment to start this high profiled event, with a handful of winners not getting their hands on the award and were not recognized on stage. As they are entrepreneurs, this is a big event with excellent exposure with the CEO of RH, so when something like this happens, it’s disappointing to lose the free exposure. I hope RH does something in return to assist those who were not publicly mentioned. Alex did mention free drinks for those not mentioned.