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."

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.

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.

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.

Speakers already confirmed include The US Navy SPAWAR, GE, Savi Technology, University of Michigan, Fisk University, Structural Graphics, MicroStrain, Axcess Technologies, The Facility, NREL and many others.

This year has already seen a huge increase in the choice of electronic components that can be printed or are compatible with printing in that they are thin, flexible and can support further printed circuitry on top.

In the last year, the burgeoning printed and thin film electronics industry has greatly enhanced its repertoire and changed its priorities, encompassing such things as rapid commercialisation of disposable and invisible electronics.

In less than two weeks IDTechEx's inaugural Energy Harvesting & Storage event will take place in Cambridge, UK.

Some of the new electric cars generate at least some of their electric power from solar cells on the vehicle - In future, they may generate electricity in part from shock absorbers, transparent solar cells over windows and thermoelectrically from the engine and exhaust in hybrid.

IDTechEx finds that the market for printed and potentially printed electronics, including organics, inorganics and composites, will rise from $1.92 billion in 2009 to $57.16 billion in 2019.

IDTechEx is delighted to announce that Unilever, the €40bn plus consumer goods giant, has joined its multiclient study of e-labels.

This article shares some of the research carried out for the new IDTechEx report "Energy Harvesting and Storage for Electronic Devices 2009-2019".

The news media are full of the details of the global financial meltdown. Is this affecting finance for the small companies and start-ups involved in printed and potentially printed electronics and electrics? We think not.

How Printed Electronics is changing consumer goods and services - highlights from the forthcoming Printed Electronics USA event

The new IDTechEx masterclass, called "Creating new products with printed electronics," will explore the needs by industry sector and appraise the technologies and timelines.

Globally the printing industry is in decline. Are the centuries of sophisticated development of the science and production technology for printing declining in a whimper? The answer is probably not. Certainly there is a fascinating escape route opening up for some. It is the printing of electronics.

Active RFID is little reported, but its use is growing rapidly. New IDTechEx research