Each year IDTechEx recognises and rewards outstanding achievement of those involved in the rapidly growing industries they cover. For the first time, IDTechEx are including 3D Printing Europe Awards, which were announced at IDTechEx Show! on 28th April in Berlin.

Back in 2013, we witnessed the launch by Samsung and LG of the first AMOLED displays deposited on plastic substrates, and the first efforts to encapsulate plastic and flexible displays that IDTechEx is forecasting will become more than a $16bn dollar market in the next 5 years.

The IDTechEx conference Electric Vehicles: Everything is Changing tears up the rule book on the electric vehicles market, which will be worth $500 million by 2025 (IDTechEx Research figures 2015).

IDTechEx is excited to announce the agenda for 3D Printing Europe 2015. After months of planning, we are ready to launch our fantastic speaker programme.

About $160 million has been invested in graphene companies, excluding government and IPO financing. Companies continue to move up the value chain, from selling graphene to selling graphene based intermediary products such as inks - a welcome development from end users as it lifts their burden of fine tuning and experimentation.

Since the first consumer-level 3D printers came on the scene six years ago their sales have grown substantially

At the start, there was no generic name. The simple glass of the car windshield started to incorporate printed antennas and heaters. It was what we now know as "structural electronics" - one structure performing mechanical, electrical and other functions.

The metal oxide backplane technology has many clear advantages.

3D printing has come of age; the total market surpassed $1bn in revenues during 2012 and growth is expected to continue throughout all target sectors to reach $20bn by 2025.

The progress of virtual reality headsets.

Load bearing structures that are also electronic or electrical are called structural electronics. This two-for-the-price-of-one approach can be more reliable, attractive and long-lived and it always saves space.

2014 has been an eventful year for the graphene industry.

The market for hybrid and pure electric cars homologated as such is set to be $188 billion in 2025 according to IDTechEx analysis.

Structural electronics (SE) is one of the most important emerging technologies in this century.

OLED displays are the biggest opportunity for flexible encapsulation and for that reason IDTechEx has highlighted the most significant advances in the technology in its recently updated report on the topic "Barrier Layers for Flexible Electronics 2015-2025: Technologies, Markets, Forecasts".

The Apple Watch was officially announced earlier this month, with the promise that it will come with a flexible display. However, there is some confusion about what the term means and what the benefits are for consumers. Dr Guillaume Chansin, co-author of the IDTechEx report "OLED Display Forecasts 2014-2024: the rise of plastic and flexible displays" gives his view on flexible displays.

Graphene electrodes are one of the best prospects for enabling supercapacitors and superbatteries to take up to half of the lithium-ion battery market in 15 years - amounting to tens of billions of dollars yearly.

IDTechEx forecasts that the market for plastic and flexible OLED displays will rise to $16bn by 2020.

New research by IDTechEx in the report Graphene Markets, Technologies and Opportunities 2014-2024 External Link shows that graphene markets will grow from around $20 million in 2014 to more than $390 million in 2024, at the material level.

The conductive ink and paste business is a large market that will generate $1.6 billion in 2014 in revenue at the ink/paste level.