Plastic electronics will, of course, never duplicate silicon's performance, but that isn't the point. Silicon-based electronics, unlike paper electronics, will never be useful for such a broad range of inexpensive, even disposable applications like business cards that update themselves or their owner's location, small tabs that can quickly diagnose disease in the home, billboards that offer video and a host of entirely new markets made possible by paper substrates.

While some technical issues remain, the real promise of paper electronics lies in its adaptability to roll-to-roll (R2R) printing. R2R printing will allow printing of large areas of paper substrates at speeds faster than an Olympic sprinter can run. With such high volume production and cheap materials, paper electronics will bring intelligence to innumerable tasks that today are strictly low tech.

Perhaps the most promising sector of paper electronics is in paper batteries and ultracapacitors. Paper, already in common use in power capacitors like those used on utility poles, can be made into a battery by simply coating a sheet of paper with an electrode-like material, usually carbon nanotubes or more recently, graphene. Paper batteries will soon be able to replace those found in common commercial products like cell phones. What paper batteries can do that conventional batteries cannot is adapt to unusual (or flat) shapes and, in the form of ultracapacitors, deliver bursts of power efficiently. Because of their versatility, paper batteries and ultracapacitors will be able to address enormous potential markets.

Thintri's Paper Electronics report covers the state of paper electronics and paper battery development, and discusses promising applications and markets that can be captured within the decade. Those markets include displays and keypads on ordinary, disposable packaging, general-purpose flexible displays, signage (such as continually updating price information on supermarket and retail items), home-use medical diagnostics and medical devices as well as anti-counterfeiting and retail product security. Market forecasts are provided to 2020.

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Global Internet traffic and particularly mobile data demand have soared in volume, with demand in some sectors such as smartphones growing at more than 100% per year. Conventional wireless networks are rapidly becoming overburdened, as available capacity fails to keep up with bandwidth demand. This problem will only get worse over the course of the decade, even with the emergence of LTE and 4G networks. At the same time, many residents of rural areas remain out of range of broadband wireless and fiber optic networks, and must rely on dial-up or satellite connections for Internet access and data transfer. As costs of data transmission plummet, carriers are faced with declining revenues, with little incentive to expand their coverage into thinly populated areas.

All of this is happening as new applications, such as the Internet of Things and Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications, are emerging, in which separate, often small, devices communicate with each other without human intervention. M2M promises new levels of performance and efficiency while placing even greater demands on communications networks.

One emerging solution is TV White Space (TVWS). TVWS consists of sub-700 MHz bands, those thin slivers of spectrum between the VHF and UHF channels. The bands have been freed up by the transition from analog to digital television and made available by the FCC for unlicensed use. Applied to data communications, TVWS offers wider broadband coverage than Wi-Fi or WiMAX, at lower cost.

TVWS systems have already been deployed and proven their performance, as a number of prominent players in communications have begun to supply hardware and systems for TVWS networks. TVWS technology has also led to the development of novel spectrum management schemes that allow for far more efficient utilization of spectrum than has been possible previously, and which will eventually be used in other bands as well.

Thintri's TV White Space report discusses the approaching bandwidth crunch and the ability of TVWS systems to offer highly profitable solutions, as demand in specific applications reaches petabytes per month. It also discusses opportunities in TVWS technology and potential markets and emerging demand in the consumer, healthcare and business sectors. The report provides market forecasts to 2020.

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One of the most promising, earliest and potentially most profitable applications will be in lubricants. Having received little attention so far, graphene-based lubricants are poised to capture multi-billion dollar markets within the decade, with far less additional development than will be required for most of graphene's other applications.

Graphene can be formulated as a solid lubricant by coating a surface with several layers, or as a fluid lubricant, whereby the graphene is added to a liquid base. Graphite, which contains graphene structures and in fact has been used as a source for graphene, is a well-established commercial lubricant. By converting graphite to graphene, the material's lubricant properties can be greatly improved and more precisely controlled, making it suitable for a wide range of tasks.

Lubricants and lubricant additives in general are a large and growing market, an essential component in any industry that involves machinery and moving parts. To date, the major impediment to growth of graphene markets has been the price of graphene, as high as $4.50 per square centimeter in early 2014. However, graphene's price is falling dramatically, and will likely go below $0.30 per square centimeter by the end of the decade. That reduction in cost will make graphene-based lubricants extremely attractive and competitive with more established lubricants, both solid and liquid. Even with the extremely low price of graphene in the near future, demand will be so great that annual revenues will be in the billions.

Thintri's market alert on graphene-based lubricants analyzes the demand for lubricants in industry, the status of graphene development, and discusses applications and markets for graphene-based lubricants and lubricant additives with forecasts to 2020.

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