British companies lead the way in display technology

Eyetease has developed a display that only requires four watts of power. It automatically adjusts to the ambient light level so that it won’t dazzle other road users.

It took three years for Eyetease to obtain permission to install its displays on London taxis. “No one had ever done digital media on the roof of a taxi,” says Corbett. “It was like trying to strap a screen on to the Queen of England herself.”

The technology has been trialled for two years and is finally reaping commercial rewards. From a turnover of £300,000 this year, the company is forecast to generate £1.2m next year.

Future foldable computers

“We develop radical new flexible electronics,” says Steve Kelly, founder of SmartKem. “We’re the window to the internet of things in the future.”

Kelly's Denbighshire-based semiconductor firm has created a new way of printing electronics onto plastic materials. SmartKem is “fabless” – it licenses its IP to partners including Samsung, Panasonic and LG rather than manufacturing products.

“These are fully flexible, unbreakable and low cost to produce,” says Kelly. “The main application is in flexible mobile phones and tablets, and wearable technology.

The demand for printable electronics is growing fast, and is anticipated to be worth $25bn (£15bn) within 10 years. “The future applications are really exciting,” says Kelly. “Imagine an electronic newspaper that you can roll up and put in your pocket?”

Kelly founded the company in 2009 and currently employs 16 people, including 12 PhDs. All its revenues are currently generated from outside the UK, as the Taiwanese and Chinese electronics giants are the primary customers for this kind of technology. But this could all be about to change.

“Flexible electronics can be made through simple printing processes, which means that we could start manufacturing them in the UK,” says Kelly. While the technology is cheap, the cost of shipping products around the world is high, another driver for opening more factories in the West.

“The market potential here is massive,” adds Kelly. “Just imagine, in a few years you’re going to have a computer that folds up like origami to the size of a credit card.”

Stores get hi-tech

High street retailers have struggled to compete with their online rivals. But a new technology will help them to tip the balance in their favour. Displaydata makes digital smart labels for the shelf edge that are low power, full colour and connected to the cloud.

“Retailers can update their websites and mobile apps very quickly, but rolling out promotions and pricing changes in bricks and mortar environments has always been much slower,” explains Jacquie Boast, Displaydata’s SVP of sales. “When you have thousands of stores it can take up to seven days to get labels changed.”

Displaydata’s labels are bistable electrophonetic displays (EPDs). They use a small burst of power to create an image, which then stays on the glass once the power is turned off. This means that the battery life of a single label is around eight years. Using these digital labels, brands can instantly push out price changes and react to competitor promotions. They can also feature customer reviews, QR codes that take the customer to a website, and nutritional content.

These sorts of labels are already commonplace in Europe and Japan, but the market is in its infancy in the UK.

A winner of the Institute of Physics’ Innovation Awards, Displaydata is forecasting rapid growth from a turnover of £16m last year to £22m this year. “We’ve seen a huge amount of interest from grocery and electronics customers,” says Boast. “When fresh produce is reaching the end of its shelf life, it can be prices down quickly, and electronics retailers are using richer content on the shelf edge to compete with online players. These labels let you talk about more than the price: an extended warranty, for example, which helps to give them the edge.”

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