Online music service Spotify has announced that it now has one million paying subscribers across Europe.

News of the milestone comes as Spotify continues a fund-raising from investors in advance of a launch in the US.

The Anglo-Swedish company has 6.67 million users, the majority of whom use a free service subsidised by adverts.

Spotify's profitability depends on users switching to premium services that remove adverts and allow listeners to use smartphones.

The company announced on its website's blog: "It seems like only yesterday we were hatching ideas for a new music service in a tiny office-cum-apartment with a broken coffee machine.

"So it's with a sense of real pride and excitement that we can announce a new milestone today, having welcomed our millionth paying subscriber to the service. "

Spotify is in the process of a $100m funding round that analysts estimate values the company at $1bn (£616m).

The company's plans to launch in the US have been delayed by concerns at the big music labels about the success of its business model.

Spotify pays royalties each time a song is played on its service.

Last year, it was estimated that the subscriber base represented about 7%-8% of Spotify's total user base.

But with one million subscribers, that percentage has risen to about 15%, the company said.

Facebook is launching a system that allows users to report friends who they think may be contemplating suicide.

The feature is being run in conjunction with Samaritans, which said several people had used it during a test phase.

Anyone worried about a friend can fill out a form, detailing their concerns, which is passed to the social networking site's moderators.

It follows reports of several cases where Facebook users announced their intention to commit suicide online.

The reporting page asks for the address (URL) of the Facebook page where the messages are posted, the full name of the user and details of any networks they are members of.

Suicide-related alerts will be escalated to the highest level, for attention by Facebook's user operations team.

Police alert
 
"When a report is made, they then assess whether they need to call the police immediately or forward it on to us," said Samaritans' Nicola Peckett.

Facebook said that it had always been its policy to notify police if a user was at risk of imminent bodily harm.

The system had been operating in a trial mode, without publicity for three months, during which it received several genuine reports and no hoaxes, according to Samaritans.

It is hoped that the new reporting mechanism will help prevent cases like that of Simone Back, who died on Christmas day after taking a drug overdose.

The charity worker from Brighton had written about her intention to kill herself on her Facebook page.

Several of her friends commented on the message, however no-one raised the alarm.

Samaritans said that the new system was not launched in relation to one specific case, but to raise awareness of the ways in which people could get help.

A glitch on Apple's iPhone has stopped its built-in alarm clock going off, leaving many people oversleeping on the first two days of the New Year.

Angry bloggers and tweeters complained that they had been late for work, and were risking missing planes and trains.

Apple has acknowledged the problem and says it will be fixed by 3 January.

The reason has not been given but the glitch appears to affect single alarm settings on the iPhone 4 and earlier models with software updates.

According to the company, the problem will resolve itself on 3 January, but that is two days late for many people”

A similar problem hit the iPhone alarm when the clocks went back in November, again causing many users to be late for work or for transport arrangements.

"We're aware of an issue related to non-repeating alarms set for January 1 or 2," Apple spokeswoman Natalie Harrison said in a statement quoted by Macworld.

"Customers can set recurring alarms for those dates and all alarms will work properly beginning January 3."

'Two days too late'

The problem is embarrassing for Apple, not only because of previous problems that came to light when the clocks changed, but because the company prides itself on the simplicity of use of its products.

This seems like another simple error, but it cannot afford to have too many before its reputation becomes tarnished, he says.

Apple failed to patch the problem last time - meaning the same alarm bug was reported around the world when the clocks changed in different regions, our reporter says.

Apple should have learnt from that example and seen this one coming, he adds. According to the company, the problem will resolve itself on 3 January, but that is two days late for many people.

More than 1.7m people around the world had bought iPhone 4 handsets by June 2010, in what was the company's most successful product launch.

A number of people with Hotmail accounts have posted complaints on Microsoft forums complaining that their e-mails have been deleted.

Users around the world said e-mails were missing from their inbox and other folders within their Hotmail accounts.

A spokeswoman for Microsoft said that the issue of missing e-mails was not a widespread problem.

By Sunday evening the issue was "fully resolved", she said. The company apologised for any inconvenience.

Facebook was forced to take itself offline after a staff member accidentally leaked internal product prototypes.

The social network was unreachable for about 20-30 minutes while the mess was cleared up.

The outage happened as the site introduced redesigned brand pages, a revamped photos section and a new page management feature.

 In a statement on its blog, Facebook apologised for the brief downtime.

"For a brief period of time, some internal prototypes were made public to a number of people externally." read the message. "As a result, we took the site down for a few minutes. It's back up, and we apologise for the inconvenience."

The BBC understands that the problem arose when code for a number of new products was exposed to the public before they were ready to be launched. This included a feature called "memories" that indexed what people have done on Facebook chronologically.More...