The fourth annual IDTechEx Printed Electronics Asia event was held in Hong Kong in mid October. The event this year had much more of a commercialization flair - companies discussing product opportunities and technologies that can be moved to high volume production.

Printed and partly printed electronics and electrics are not being applied to very expensive things or electronic things first. It is more about modernising printing more than it is about modernising electronics.

The electric vehicle business is over $33 billion today at ex factory prices but cars are less than half of that. As the market nearly quintuples over the next ten years, cars will rise to nearly 55% of the business but the devil is in the detail...

In 1880, they said that the future of the car was electric. In April 2010, Bill Ford of Ford Motor Company said "It appears that the biggest game-changer will be electric vehicles."

By a big margin. the world's largest database of RFID projects is the IDTechEx RFID Knowledgebase. It has just surpassed 4000 projects in 111 countries. Containing technical details, descriptive text, 770 company RFID slide shows and audio, ...

This week more than 250 people attended the second annual IDTechEx event on Energy Harvesting and Wireless Sensor Networks & Real Time Locating Systems. These two events are co-located given the overlap in topic and attendees were delighted with the breadth of subjects that were covered. The exhibition had trebled from last year to 20 exhibitors.

Yet it is only a first step to small devices communicating without human involvement and without those radio masts and their expensive and vulnerable cabling. Remember that...

IDTechEx Printed Electronics Europe award winners

The burgeoning electric vehicle EV industry cannot be understood by simply looking at cars. The complete market value is, and will remain, about double the market for cars. The leaders such as Toyota, Honda and Nissan make electric vehicles for many applicational sectors.

IDTechEx projects that the market for passive RFID tags will grow to over $10 billion in sales by 2019. Much of it will continue to use silicon chips. Dr Peter Harrop forecasts the Printed RFID market for 2010.

As we enter the New Year IDTechEx look back and summarises some of the main global trends in 2009 and gives some predictions, and indeed areas of opportunity, for the New Year.

IDTechEx Printed Electronics USA Award Winners Announced This week the IDTechEx Printed Electronics USA event opened to more than 900 attendees from 28 countries - by far the World's largest event on the topic. Held in San Jose, CA, the event featured more end users than ever before and grew by almost 25% compared to the same event in 2008. The event featured the annual IDTechEx Printed Electronics USA Awards ceremony, aimed to recognize outstanding achievement.

Electronics and electrics are becoming ubiquitous, the devices appearing on and in higher and higher volume products including e-labels and e-packaging. This calls for different forms of battery, capacitor and other energy storage because priorities such as environmental credentials, thinness and compatibility with energy harvesting (eg. solar cells) come to the fore alongside life and cost.

The first day of the conference (attended by more than 290 attendees) was focused on presentations from end users of energy harvesting and wireless sensor networks technologies, with the first presentation given by IDTechEx CEO Raghu Das, giving an overview of needs for energy harvesting as well as the three generations of technologies (active RFID, RTLS and mesh & WSN) that have evolved into the current market for Wireless Sensor Networks, a market due to reach US$1.75 Billion by 2019.

This week the IDTechEx events Energy Harvesting & Storage and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) & RTLS took place in Denver, CO, USA. The event was attended by more than 290 attendees, with a brilliantly diverse spread of those through the value chain - from component suppliers to solution providers to many end users from different industries.

Active RFID will rise from 10% of the total RFID market this year to 24% in 2019, meaning a huge $6.74 billion market.

Plug in hybrid electric cars are now prioritised by most major car manufacturers. Pure electric on- road cars are prioritised by Nissan and a host of vibrant start up companies, they have one thing in common. The cleverest, most expensive part of their planned vehicles is increasingly the traction battery.

While materials for organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) are getting better and better, and encouraging news about record-breaking parameters in efficacy and luminance were published quite recently, one of the major problems in flexible lighting and display devices is still unsolved: the lifetime of such devices is too short, and hence, customers are not ready to pay, no matter how impressive and elegant the systems may look.

While some involved in OLEDs and OTFTs are moving out of the business of printed and potentially printed electronics, work on inorganic materials and compounds is increasing. The IDTechEx Printed Electronics Asia event in Tokyo will give a balanced view with many presentations being World firsts.

As forecasted by RFID Forecasts, Players, Opportunities 2009-2019, there has been a surge in orders for RFID in 2009. Despite the world's largest RFID project, the $6 billion China National ID card scheme, being completed a year earlier and now being just at replacement level, the global RFID market is rising 5% this year to $5.56 billion.