One thing that is interesting about this story is the fancy new Coke machines you see that let you choose from a hundred of combination of flavors via a touch-screen was a joint development led by DEKA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola_Freestyle

Basically this was a method to get their foot in the door and gain trust to a point to get the Slingshot project going, as far as I understand it.