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The water system that serves the U.S. capital city of Washington, D.C. dates back to the nation's Civil War. Just think - in the time of Lincoln people dug into the ground with hand-made shovels to lay a water system.

Today, that 19th Century water system for the District of Columbia is now arguably one of the smartest in the world.

Why? Those water pipes are now fitted with sensors that analyze data on valves, storm drains, service vehicles and truck routes.

Facebook use is growing faster in Africa than on any other continent, and the Chinese are some of the most active social media users in the world.

The first fact comes from Socialbakers, a Facebook analytics company, which found that Africa gained more than 50% of its Facebook users in the last six months. The company also looks at other growing markets. The second comes from a Memeburn article by Thomas Crampton, which points out that although many Western social media services are blocked, the Chinese equivalents are extremely popular. And, according to Crampton, "A recent study by OgilvyOne in China found that 55 percent of China's netizens had initiated or participated in online discussions about companies."

Today's live blog comes from IBM Pulse where we will explore how data moves to the greater physical world, be it buildings or physical objects.

It's also an event that demonstrates how deep Tivilo is still embedded into the enterprise data center for the management of IT assets. We'll be sure to hear more about that in the keynotes this morning.

Let's get started.

Bob Schroeder is the director of product management at Qwest Business. In this interview, he provides a high level overview of what you should be doing to protect your company against security threats.

Schroeder talks about anti-virus, securing mobile networks, encryption and more.

This week the email management company Mimecast released the results of a survey of more than 2,400 corporate email users. The survey found that 85% of what Mimecast dubs "Generation Gmail" - employees 25 years old and younger - have used personal email accounts to send work-related documents.

The main reason these workers turn to personal email seems to be the attachment size limits of their official work email accounts. As we've reported, Palo Alto Networks found that Web-based file sharing such as Megaupload is also very popular in the workplace.

In a recent article former MySQL CEO and current Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos explores the impact that working on open source code has on an organization. Mickos, I suspect, is mostly talking about companies like Eucalyptus and MySQL that focus on creating open source and open core software - not companies that happen to contribute code to open source projects.

I found myself wondering, however, how many companies actually contribute back to the projects they use. Does your company?

This version of OSX, titled Lion, will be released later next year. Apple released a developer preview today and it may contain something of interest for the enterprise: OSX Lion Server. OSX Lion Server is a core feature of OSX Lion, included at no extra cost. You will be able to provision any Mac with Lion as a server through a guided setup process.

"And it provides local and remote administration -- for users and groups, push notifications, file sharing, calendaring, mail, contacts, chat, Time Machine, VPN, web, and wiki services -- all in one place," according to the Apple website. It will include a profile manager, Wiki Server and support file sharing with the iPad.

Google Cloud Connect is a Microsoft Office plugin released today by Google. It has been available for testers since November, but it is now generally available. It syncs a user's Office docs with their Google Docs, and adds a toolbar for sharing documents right into Office. We've been asking for offline access for Google Docs for years now, and this is a step towards that.

The hosting business is going through a shift that could make many providers obsolete or conversely give the smart ones the keys to the kingdom.

It's very clear why this is the case. Cloud computing is serving as a catalyst for innovation that is just beginning to be felt in all parts of the world. That movement will push deeper as more small businesses see ways to make their work more focused by using services that remove the IT burden from their work.

We're live blogging this morning from the Parallels Summit, where hosting providers are learning about how to turn their infrastructures into multi-tenant environments so they may serve this emerging market.

Google announced the Google Apps Certification Program today. The program will certify IT professionals who have demonstrated the ability to sell, deploy, develop and support Google Apps. The first certification is the Goolge Apps Certified Deployment Specialist, "which certifies IT professionals who have demonstrated the fundamental knowledge and skills required to migrate to, configure, and deploy Google Apps."