Next week the IDTechEx Energy Harvesting & USA 2013 event (www.EnergyHarvestingUSA.com ) will open in Santa Clara, CA - Nov 20-21.

There are just three weeks left until IDTechEx's Supercapacitors USA event in Santa Clara California, on November 20-21.

Supercapacitors are increasing the range of electric vehicles in several ways and by doing so they are hugely increasing the addressable market for those vehicles. Typically, they last for the life of the vehicle regardless of how many cycles are endured.

IDTechEx has just completed an intense study of Printed Electronics in Japan involving 35 visits to companies and institutions there and interviews and lectures at the IDTechEx Printed Electronics Asia event there.

The chemical industry will end up with most of the added value from printed electronics, one of the fastest growing technologies in the world.

This article shares some of the research in the new IDTechEx report, "Range Extenders for Electric Vehicles Land, Water & Air 2013-2023" which covers all such vehicles, on land, on/under water and airborne.

Life is good for supercapacitors manufacturers and developers.

Tablet and smart phone sales reached 116 million and 675 million units in 2012, exhibiting a year-to-year growth of 43 and 94%, respectively. In contrast, desktop sales have declined. The market message is clear: consumers are demanding fully portable devices. This translates into a large and growing market opportunity for energy storage devices.

In this article we will briefly look at implementations in the rail transit sector, and the kind of technologies that are making their way onto trains, railways and waysides in order to reduce power consumption, maintenance costs and reliability of train services.

Flexible portable electronics, in order to retain their versatility would benefit from harvesters and batteries or supercapacitors on plastic substrates.

In 2013 the market size for gold ink for electronic and electrical applications is less than $1 million - used mainly for academic work and some early stage work in healthcare products. However, a new report from IDTechEx Research titled New Opportunities for Gold: Conductive Inks for the Electronics Industry 2013-2019 finds that with demand from medical applications, edge connectors and interfaces with organic materials such as sensors the market will growth to $50 million in 2018, in the "most likely" scenario.

Questions arise as to how much supercapacitors can improve if organisations more like NASA took over. After all, if supercapacitors can replace many batteries when, as today, they store one tenth of their energy, what will happen in the marketplace if they approach the theoretical ten times the lithium-ion battery figure while acting as a near-perfect "battery"?

2008 to 2010 saw huge enthusiasm and interest in the development of small energy harvesters.

Graphene has already come a long way towards commercialisation, despite its short history. But really hard questions still remain about what comes next and how to grow revenues.

IDTechEx has recently launched an online browser-based Market Intelligence Portal , bringing you in-depth market intelligence and independent analysis throughout the year.

The day is coming when electric vehicles (EVs) land, water and airborne are as much as 80% electronics and electrics if we include the power components.

The new report from IDTechEx titled Printed, Organic & Flexible Electronics: Forecasts, Players & Opportunities 2013-2023 finds that the total market for these technologies will grow from $16.04 billion in 2013 to $76.79 billion in 2023.

Variously called Printed, Flexible or Organic Electronics, it is one of the fastest growing technologies in the world. It is of vital interest to industries as diverse as consumer goods, healthcare, mobility, electronics, media and architecture.

Maxwell Technologies, which has been the leader in supercapacitors worldwide, has been overstating its results by improperly recording certain sales through distributors.

Supercapacitors replace lithium-ion batteries. Lithium-ion batteries replace nickel metal hydride and lead acid batteries. There are side stories of course. Some supercapacitors replace electrolytic capacitors and others create new applications. However, in this article, we concentrate on replacing lithium-ion batteries.