By Lynne Taylor

The US Food and Drug Administration will never have sufficient resources to be “the quality-control unit of the world,” and drugmakers will have to assume more responsibility for the quality of their products, a senior agency official has told US legislators.

The FDA is not the industry’s quality system, and the agency is holding companies accountable, Janet Woodcock, director of FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, warned after addressing a hearing convened on April 24 by Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy, chairman of the Senate Education, Labor, Health and Pensions (HELP) Committee to discuss the contaminated heparin supply. “Any legislative fixes that do not address quality by design will fail,” she added.

The outlook on today’s economy is tenuous at best. The impending presidential elections simply cloud the issue more for most small to medium sized businesses. It begs the question; where do you spend your dollars in today’s market? Do you allocate those resources towards employees that directly impact the revenue stream such as sales personnel, or does that take a backseat to operational efficiency and the computer network in the context of IT professionals? Perhaps it doesn’t need to be an “either or” decision.

Over the last few months I have written a weekly piece on how the Web is evolving. Taking into account the current trends in technology, and the direction in which the web is developing I have tried to define Web 3.0. At the end of volume one of this discussion piece, I think we have come a long way. To help you digest everything, I am presenting you with the entire article as How To Split An Atom’s Definitive Guide To Web 3.0, Volume One. I’ve made some editorial changes and commentary along the way. Technology evolves quickly and the online space has managed to change even between when I started this article and now.

There's hype. There's hysteria. And there's history. The hype around Apple Inc. (AAPL)'s upcoming iPhone is abundantly clear. So is the hysteria. But how the iPhone will leave its historical mark after Friday's launch is to be seen.

Will the gadget - which triples as a cell phone, iPod media player and a wireless Web device - be as "revolutionary" as Apple CEO Steve Jobs has claimed?

Even if the product flops for some reason or stays limited to the high-end corner of the smart phone market, the iPhone has already jolted the industry, showing that it is not just the body and outward beauty of the handset that counts, but what's inside.

Remember the television ads for the Motorola RAZR?