E-labels will be a huge business and the opportunity overlaps with e-packaging. Increasingly, both will need energy harvesting. On some counts, 90 billion labels are printed every year in the world but e-labels have a potential of hundreds of billions yearly because here we shall have everything from self-adjusting use by dates that monitor if you have overheated the product to labels that emit aromas, speak and otherwise promote products when you approach.
The human interface will progress from employing just sight of static print that one in three cannot read because of dyslexia, illiteracy, eye disease, shaking etc. It will employ many of the fourteen human senses and it will do it with moving colour images, scrolling and page turned messages where you can adjust the font, with texture change, sound, flashing light and much more.
But there is the problem. The choice of what is possible is immense and changing by the day. Suppliers are offering dedicated products such as the shelf edge or apparel label that have both RFID and a radio controlled electronic price display but these are not value engineered products useful across most industries. They are not capable of mass production or affordable in huge volumes.
Enter IDTechEx. To clear this logjam, we are offering a multiclient study of the technology and market roadmap of e-labels including specification of a range of imaginative e-labels acceptable to a broad range of industries from consumer, industrial and healthcare to military to get the volume.
This will be based on primary research by our technical staff in the USA, Germany, the UK and East Asia etc. We shall get responses to many functioning "it would work like this" samples. For example, the study will establish if the majority of people want page turning or a scrolled message and what they would pay for, in what volume, for a range of e-labels costing, say, two cents to two dollars. Can they be made in part-dedicated form and then programmed to purpose by the factory, issuer and/or user? These and many other questions posed by the participants in the study will be answered and they will own any intellectual property resulting, gaining huge commercial advantage.
LAND BIG ORDERS
This can provide you with an extra one billion dollars of business, whether you make the materials, print the electronics, make the labels, the packaging or make the consumer/ industrial goods etc that will now sell in larger volumes.
The following pictures show just a small part of the technological evolution that is about to hit labels and packaging, the possible flow of a range of e-labels through the value chain (fig 1) and the methodology of the study (fig 2). Those participating will gain considerable sales from the secret information and design concepts resulting.
Fig 1
Possible flow of a range of e-labels through the value chain
Fig 2
One of the world's largest consumer goods companies has now signed up for this project and they need partners soon because this commercial opportunity is considered to be so pivotal that they will not be waiting to start in several month's time. Materials, circuit printing, label and packaging participants will be in with their future major customers right from the beginning, with regular participative meetings to drive the project. Contact Dr Peter Harrop at p.harrop@idtechex.com now.
For more attend: Energy Harvesting and Storage Europe 2009
