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By   GILLIAN WONG An exhibitor displays a 3D face-capture system at the 17th China Beijing International High-Tech Expo (CHITEC) in May.   Zuma Press On several fronts, 2014 was a particularly eventful year for China’s technology sector. While a handful of domestic players grabbed headlines with blockbuster share offerings, major acquisitions or soaring valuations, some multinational firms encountered major obstacles in their efforts to expand in the vast but increasingly challenging market. Chief among 2014’s Chinese tech highlights was e-commerce giant Alibaba’s  record initial public offering  in New York that raised $25 billion and catapulted it onto the international stage. Also raising eyebrows was Lenovo, the No. 1 personal computer maker, with its sizable acquisitions: first a  server business from IBM  for $2.3 billion, then  Motorola Mobility from Google for $2.91 billion . It was also a year that saw Xiaomi, a four-year-old smartphone company, soar to prominen

IN DEPTH  The momentum behind Ultra HD 4K TV is quickly gathering By  James Rivington   November 26th 2014 4K is the hottest techy buzzword of 2014, and it's a technology that's rewriting the rulebook when it comes to image quality. It affects not just the world of 4K TV and cinema, but also cameras and image capture, smartphones and tablets, computer monitors and PC games - practically anything that displays images or records video. 4K TV sets are now available from most of the major TV manufacturers, but they're merely the tip of a very cool technology iceberg. So what, we hear you ask, is 4K really all about? What is 4K? What that means in terms of potential image clarity is more fine detail, greater texture and an almost photographic emulsion of smoothness.The headline fact is simple and dramatic: 4K Ultra HD TVs (also known as UHD TVs) deliver four times as much detail as 1080p Full HD, that's eight million pixels compared to two