An early provider of online productivity applications, Zoho has moved quickly to build out a substantial suite of integrated applications that compete with Google and others in the cloud computing space.

Zoho’s CEO Sridhar Vembu had an entertaining blog post yesterday responding to a Microsoft executive’s reference to “fake Office” products. Earlier this week, Microsoft announced price cuts to its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) by a third, bringing the price down from $15 per user to $10 per month. Google’s App Suite, by comparison, costs $50 per user, per year.

Vembu quotes Ron Markezich, corporate vice president of Microsoft Online, as noting the company offers a scaled-down version of BPOS for $36 a year. And furthermore “…we’re not seeing any inclination that Zoho or Google or Zimbra or any other of those offering fake Office capabilities can replace [Microsoft Office].”

That was all too much of a red flag for Vembu not to charge after:

The Data Breach Notification Act, sponsored by Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), would authorize the attorney general to bring civil actions against firms that failed to notify people whose personal information had been compromised in a breach. It would also extend notification requirements to government agencies.

The more comprehensive Personal Data Privacy and Security Act, introduced by Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and co-sponsored by Utah Republican Orrin Hatch and others, would also set notification requirements, as well as tighten criminal penalties for identity theft and willfully concealing information about a breach.

"The compiler removes dead code, then rewrites and minimizes what's left so that it will run fast on browsers' JavaScript engines," Google stated. "The compiler also checks syntax, variable references, and types, and warns about other common JavaScript pitfalls."

"The vulnerabilities could allow an attacker, who successfully exploits the vulnerabilities, to run malicious code on the affected system," Adobe stated in its advisory.

Creative Labs, maker of the Zen MP3 player, PC speakers and other hardware, surprised investors by showing off a prototype of a touchscreen e-reader during a recent annual meeting -- and by trash-talking the Kindle.

If reports are true as described by blog EpiZENter, the device is being called the MediaBook for now and features a touchscreen, text-to-speech, SD memory card slot and will offer Internet access. It will be powered on the company's Zii processor.

Though spokesmen for Creative had not returned calls by press time, CEO Sim Wong Hoo wrote in the introduction of the company's most recent earnings filings that new Zii products "can possibly include mobile phones, TV set-top boxes, video conferencing systems, digital signs, netbooks, eBooks and other mobile communication devices."

The MediaBook would join a fleet of fledgling wireless reading devices, including Barnes & Noble's Nook, Sony's Daily Edition, the iRex by iRex Technologies, Que by Plastic Logic and Spring Design's Alex, all chasing after Amazon's front-runner, the Kindle.

However, William Png, Creative's chief of strategic business, believes the MediaBook will stand out from the crowd. He reportedly described the Kindle as "just another electronic device that displays books in text," while the Creative device would appear to be almost an e-reader-multimedia-tablet hybrid that "will harness videos, pictures, text and services in one device that supports a media-rich experience."

For the uninitiated, embargoes are the controversial process where a tech company, usually its PR firm, offers to give advance details on a news story in exchange for the reporter agreeing not to publish the story until the exact release date and time dictated by the vendor.

The event, titled: “Embargo 2010: An Industry Discussion on Future Rules of Media Engagement,” was held in downtown San Francisco at the Varnish gallery and wine bar and hosted by Waggener Edstrom, one of the longtime biggies in tech PR that counts Microsoft among its key clients.

(Photo: from left to right: Mark Glaser, Damon Darlin, Tom Foremski and Dylan Tweney. Photo by Marie Domingo).

The kickoff was a panel smoothly moderated by former tech reporter Sam Whitmore that included editors from the New York Times (Damon Darlin), Wired.com (Dylan Tweney), Mark Glaser, MediaShift (PBS) and the tech blog Silicon Valley Watcher (Tom Foremski).

The reason embargoes are controversial is they require reporters give up a level of control in how and when a story is reported. Publications and Web sites also often break embargo agreements, deliberately or by accident, leaving the competition fuming as they scramble to catch up in this increasingly real-time news cycle.

“Embargo is Latin for ‘(expletive) you’!” cracked Tweney. “For the reader embargoes let us do more timely, thorough coverage, but we’ve also been screwed by them.”