Media Converged, a division of Qwasi Inc.

The Economist: ON SEPTEMBER 17th Christopher Bailey, Burberry’s creative director, sent models shimmering down the catwalk in a luminous array of lace coats and tiny metallic shorts. The event, part of London Fashion Week, was streamed live to Burberry stores and suburban laptops, allowing fashionistas everywhere to snatch a glimpse of the collections that will appear in stores next spring (see picture).

But the show comes at a dolorous time for Burberry, which has seen investors flee like models from a chip butty. Sales are slipping. Burberry’s share price slumped by 18% after the company warned that profits would be at the low end of expectations. It is likely to make around £400m ($650m) for 2012-13, a modest rise from last year’s £376m.

Mashable: Designers didn’t just bring new clothes to Lincoln Center during New York Fashion Week — several introduced new uses for digital technology as well.

Diane von Furstenberg led the pack, surprising in-person and online attendees by showcasing Google Glass — the futuristic eyewear device Google is building — down the runway. Photos were taken backstage using the device, and shared to DVF’s Google+ Page ahead of and during the show.

Ad Age: Agencies and marketers looking for the perfect YouTube star to appear in a viral video, your job just got easier.

At a keynote presentation at VidCon today, YouTube vice president of product management, Shishir Mehrotra announced Video Creation Marketplace, a platform that will connect content creators on YouTube with marketers or agencies looking for viral buzz.

Since 2007, YouTube has partnered with producers on the video site to share ad revenue, allowing people to create YouTube content for a living. “We pay out millions of dollars to partners each year,” said Baljeet Singh, group product manager at YouTube. “Thousands of channels are generating six figures a year.”

The idea is to create a more formal revenue stream for the long tail of YouTube creators. YouTube has been very focused on launching and promoting its first 100 “Original Channels,” but its message to VidCon is to the YouTube stalwarts: We’re here for you, too.

While advertising is a nice source of revenue for some, even the most successful YouTube “stars” do brand work, but to date, this has been happening on an ad hoc basis. Channels that have worked with advertisers in the past include Howcast, which leveraged its channel with a three-month General Electric takeover to kick off the brand’s “Healthymagination” campaign, and beauty vlogger Juicy Star 07, who collaborated with L’Oreal for a campaign that asked viewers to share their Voluminous mascara moments.

Forbes:  The traditional marketing funnel assumes that customers typically start the purchasing process by considering a large number of brands and then systematically narrowing down their choices. But the funnel has now become a series of loops, according to a new survey of 1700 CMOs worldwide by IBM.

The survey reveals that consumers evaluate an ever-shifting array of options as they consult (off-and online) peers, family members, independent experts, and retailers or manufacturers. Most importantly, once the transaction is completed, they often enter into an open-ended relationship with the brand, sharing theirexperiences online with others.

Laker Nation:  In an effort to keep up with the times and roll with the punches of the extremely popular social media impact on professional sports, the NBA held their first annual Social Media Awards hosted by former Los Angeles Lakers stars Shaquille O’Neal and Rick Fox.

The NBA players and teams awarded are the most influential presences on the largest social media platforms of Twitter and Facebook over the course of the 2011-12 NBA season. Of the 12 awards handed out on the first annual NBA event, Kobe Bryant and the Lakers were able to win awards taking home the honors for Social MVT, #TRENDSETTER and The Thumbs Up Award.

Here are the results of the NBA Social Media Awards:

The Social Slam: Gerald Green, New Jersey Nets - Green takes the honors of the Social Slam with his unbelievable windmill dunk against the Houston Rockets.

The EPIC Award: Jeremy Lin, New York Knicks - Lin was a no-brainer to win a few awards as he took home the EPIC award for creating Linsanity with his best performance coming against the Lakers.

USA TODAY: The great part about having a social network that over 900 million people are using is that you can find all kinds of interesting trends thanks to the data those users pump into the system. Facebook is now a public company and it has begun to start spinning up some of those stats to show how powerful it really is.

Today, the company took a peek at the location data people are sharing with their friends and family to find what it calls the “world’s most social landmarks.”

The data that Facebook used came from its own built-in location product, as well as 3rd-party apps like foursquare, that use its API. To find the most interesting trends, the company tossed out boring places like airports and train stations, and uses data that goes back to August 2010, when its check-in product launched.

In 25 cities worldwide, the top landmarks include sports stadiums, public areas, amusement parks, concert arenas and shopping centers.

Tech Crunch: lot of Londoners (me included) haven’t been able to get tickets to the London Olympics this summer. But we’ll all get something else, Facebook announced today. The company is launching Explore London 2012, a dedicated page for athletes to communicate with fans and provide their own personalized updates around the event, including medal wins and their own photographs as well as status updates. Alongside that, Facebook is adding other data to pad out the story: historical photographs and other information about notable events — part of an effort to be able to claim that 2012 will mark the first “Social Olympics.”

Officials from the International Olympics Committee tell me they started to work with Facebook on the effort some 18 months ago. So far there are only 250 of more than 10,000 Olympic athletes on the site, including UK athletes Tom Daly, Jessica Ennis, and the cycling team, although Facebook expects that to ramp up significantly in the weeks ahead. Significantly, although the pages may expect to get a huge amount of traffic from the millions of people who tune in to watch the sporting event, Facebook will not run any advertising alongside any of it.