An announcement that kind of flew under everyone’s radar was “Europe’s largest music promotion” between Coca-Cola and iTunes. The soft drink company announced last week that it would be teaming up with iTunes once again to offer free downloads along with promotional packs of Coca-Cola, Diet Coke, and Coke Zero this summer. The giveaways will come in over 2 billion packs of soda/pop/soda pop and will also come with the opportunity to win free iPods and attend Coke + iTunes sponsored concerts. The promotion will officially be launched at the Cannes Film Festival.

“Coke+iTunes aims to reinvent the ways young people create, listen to, and experience music every day. Thanks to Coke+iTunes, European youth will enjoy this Summer 2007 the biggest pan-European music experience ever. And what better way to build bridges among European cultures than through music?,” said European Union Group marketing director Chris Burggraeve in a statement.

In the summer of 2006, Coke and iTunes partnered up to give away 70 million free songs and launch a new, Coke-branded website in Europe. The promotion must have gone well if they decided to do something similar (albeit with less tunes?) again this year. My question is: when will Coke and iTunes do a promotion here in the US? Back in college, one of the most exciting things to do on a random Tuesday night was go to convenience stores and see if we could figure out which promotional Pepsi bottles had free iTunes songs (okay, so we had mundane lives). Coca-Cola should bring that joy to bored college students and Diet Coke-guzzling writers in the US, too.

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NEW YORK – 15 May, 2007 – Motorola, Inc. today introduced two new MOTO Q products: the MOTO Q 8, the GSM version of the original award-winning CDMA-based MOTO Q, as well as the flagship, lightening-fast global quad-band 3G QWERTY, MOTO Q 9, which is available in Italy this week.

The MOTO Q 9, based on the Windows Mobile 6™ operating system, couples a new sleek form factor with a dual-processor HSDPA/UMTS engine, enabling broadband-like over-the-air downloads at up to 3.6Mbps1. Consumers will be able to download their favorite music tracks directly onto the Q 9 in approximately six seconds without having to touch a computer2.

“The MOTO Q 9 was developed as a multi-purpose communication device that is easy to use and doesn’t compromise on experiences,” said Bruce Hawver, corporate vice president of Enterprise Devices, Motorola. “This smartphone offers state-of-the art voice quality technology, messaging1, speed, processing power, keyboard and display packaged within a sleek design for the modern consumer.”

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