Excitingly, the subject has now moved beyond peer reviewed academic papers to doing business. The largest European event on the subject will again be Printed Electronics Europe in Düsseldorf Germany in April 5-6 (www.IDTechEx.com/peEurope) and it will be all about who can sell to whom and how this powerful enabling technology can transform society for the better as well as creating wealth.

Printed electronics is one of the most important new enabling technologies.

There are now other forms of energy harvesters developed initially at the micro level which are now being scaled to produce enough energy to replace or supplement grid power.

Printed electronics is associated with some orders, investments and acquisitions that are one hundred times as big as the largest two years ago.

The annual IDTechEx conference on the Future of Electric Vehicles - land, water and air held in San Jose, California saw 200 attendees with 12 exhibitors. The event, hosted the gala awards to recognise outstanding achievement in the industry. The chairman of IDTechEx Dr Peter Harrop opened the awards.

The fourth annual printed electronics winners were announced on Dec 1st at the IDTechEx Awards Dinner in Santa Clara, USA.

Last week the second annual IDTechEx Energy Harvesting & Storage USA 2010 event opened to 340 people and 28 exhibitors, up significantly from the previous year, indicative of the rising interest in the topic. The event was co-located with the IDTechEx Wireless Sensor Networks and RTLS conference, bringing together all those involved in these two industries.

The Printed Electronics series of conferences and tradeshows hosted by IDTechEx are attended by a large number of end users from many verticals, including electronics, consumer packaged goods, healthcare, military, advertising & media and toy industries. These companies attend our events to meet with suppliers and preview what is currently available or what is becoming available in the near future.

The largest event in the world on the subject Printed Electronics USA 2010 (www.IDTechEx.com/peUSA) will once again have a growing minority of presentations on paper electronics.

A new quarterly hardcopy publication that guarantees to report and comment on what's happening in the world of electric and hybrid vehicles.

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.