Singapore-based Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies and San Jose, Calif.'s YLX, an LED manufacturer, bowled people over in Beijing.

The two companies tied for the Most Promising Technology award at Cleantech Forum XV in the Chinese capital.

Horizon and YLX beat out several dozen other presenting companies for the award, which was voted on by the more than 200 attendees at the forum. The award honors the most interesting company presented as a potential investment opportunity.

This was the first conference held in China by the Cleantech Group, the parent company of Cleantech.com.

The Most Promising Technology awards are handed out four times a year at the events, and there's usually a clear winner, but this time out Horizon Fuel Cell and YLX were neck and neck.

Founded in 2004, YLX raised $3 million last year from Silicon Valley's Gabriel Venture Partners and is now ready for a Series B to start up commercial production of its LED systems.

"For the near term, our focus is on image display. That is, for the TV or for the projector, like the front projector, or the new hot product, it's called the pocket projector," Li Xu, CEO of YLX, told Cleantech.com.

Small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, pocket projectors can plug into a PDA or a laptop, or a game console, and use the tiny, energy efficient LEDs to put out a large image or video for meetings, presentations, or Halo 3.

Although LEDs are energy efficient, they're not as bright as conventional bulbs, but YLX may have the answer to that problem.

"The LED light goes to all directions," said Xu. "So what our technology does is we can put a special element on top of the LED chip, and then the light will not go to all angles, it will come out with a smaller, defined angle."

That technology could lead to future applications, like headlights for cars.

A competing technology using photonic crystal nanostructures is being developed at places like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but Xu said it's not yet ready for prime time.

"That technology needs a lot of wafer level investment. And you can tell it's very capital-intensive investment," he said.

Xu said YLX's system can achieve the same, and even better, performance as the photonic crystal technology. And he said the YLX system is available today.

"This enhancement element is borrowed from telecom fiber optics technology. So it is a commercially available technology," said Xu. "We don't have to build this infrastructure to make them."

Right now, the company only produces small samples of its LED system at its Shenzen, China, location. Once a fresh round of funding is closed, Xu expects to be able to start small volume commercial production in six months, with high volume coming another six months after that.

Xu said the company is looking to raise $8 million in funding.

Horizon Fuel Cell, backed by Shanghai's bScope Venture Partners, also had a busy year, coming out with its H-Cell for remote control toy cars, as well as developing fuel cells for remote control military aerial drones.

Most recently, Horizon swapped shares with Eatontown, N.J.-based Millennium Cell (Nasdaq: MCEL) as part of a $5 million equity exchange. The two companies plan to jointly develop and sell hydrogen fuel cells for the commercial and military markets (see Millennium, Horizon Fuel Cell in stock swap).

Founded in 2003, Horizon licensed Millennium's hydrogen on demand technology earlier this year to co-develop compatible hydrogen storage cartridges for fuel cell products.

In October, the company demonstrated a 50 watt emergency power unit at the Ceatec Japan exhibition that was powered by Millennium's chemical hydride fuel technology.

The two plan to start selling the unit in 2008, with more consumer and military products to be launched in 2008 and 2009.

The next Cleantech Forum is coming up in February in San Francisco (check out Cleantech Forum San Francisco).