Indy named in "21 Best Places to Go in '21"

The Best of the Best - in the World

Trump-Biden Presidential debate 2020

Love the applause from the crowd getting Wallace to turn around and glare at them. He already knows. 

First topic: fellow Hoosier Amy Coney Barrett

Wallace: Why is he right? Why is your opponent wrong?

Trump (no hello or thanks): She's good, all good, great, greatest, single greatest, etc...

Biden: First of all, thank you. (Trump: thankyou) Biden then goes off topic, gives historic numbers, some false about ACA. Then says WOMENS RIGHTS are in jeopardy and they're charged more for the same procedure. (Trump shakes head) So it's not appropriate to move forward. 

Trump: Your numbers are false. (Narrator's note: AAAAAAND here.we.go)

Biden: The election's already started (chuckles)
Wallace interjects: yep, we're open to discussion

Biden: {clarifies} 

Trump: You're not the Democratic Party

Biden: I am the party

Trump: Not according to Harris

I noticed Joe won't look at Trump. He just smiles and freezes when confronted with troublesome facts. 

Wallace wants to know what his health care plan is. Trump says he repealed the mandate in Obamacare. Again asks what his plan is. That sets up Biden for the first attack: The President has no plan. He hammers Trump over and over. 

Then they traded jabs at an alarming rate and I'm purty drunk so I think I'm gonna quit blogging for now and enjoy the shitshow. Cheers!

Notre Dame saves college football

Now that the tide has turned again for the B1G and football is back on for an 8 week schedule including a championship game in Indianapolis on December 19th, we can maybe safely assume PAC12 will eventually wise up as well and come to some sort of plan to play and no asterisks will be needed to crown this year's champ. 

It turns out that Notre Dame's decision to join the ACC convinced them and others not to postpone their seasons. 

Just as the tide was turning and pulling back, our lord savior Swarbrick stuck his mighty stick on the ocean floor and parted a clearing for the masses to follow towards salvation and the promised land. 

When people ask why I still live in Indiana

Thanks to VisitHamCo for the list:

• Top Place to Live (Hamilton County) – CNN Money
• #1 Place to Live in America (Fishers) – Money Magazine
• Best Cities to Relocate to in America (Indianapolis/Carmel) – CNBC
• Best Cities for Young Professionals (Indianapolis/Carmel) – Forbes Magazine
• #1 Best City to Raise a Family in the Midwest (Carmel) – Yahoo Finance
• America’s Best City for Families (Fishers) – The Mortgage Reports
• Best Place to Raise a Family (Hamilton County) – Forbes Magazine
• Top Ten Best Towns for Families (Westfield) – Family Circle Magazine
• #2 Happiest Suburbs in the Nation (Fishers) – Movoto Real Estate
• #14 Best Place to Live (Carmel) – CNN Money Magazine
• #20 Best Small Town to Live in (Noblesville) – NerdWallet.com

Source: https://www.visithamiltoncounty.com/invest-hamilton-county/blog/post/best-places/

Two Mr Basketball candidates lead LC

3 years ago, the Lawrence Central basketball Bears were bounced from the opening round of the playoffs. The following year, D'Andre Davis and Nijel Pack advanced to the Sectional championship. Last year, LC posted a 22-4 overall record on their way to a Regional appearance. A loss, if you will, but still a Sectional Win. Either way you look at it is bittersweet. They're hoping to drop that bitterness when they contend for a State title in March of 2020; but right now, this dynamic duo is focused on it's annual Thanksgiving Eve matchup against Lawrence North. May the games begin. 

Speaking of rivalries, Purdue hosts Indiana at Noon in their annual Thanksgiving Saturday matchup, aka The Old Oaken Bucket game. IU who is looking for their 8th regular-season win, is hoping for a Gator Bowl invite in warm, sunny Florida this New Year... or maybe that's just me. And before you ask: Yes, I'll even take Notre Dame as a consolation prize. 

Hamilton Co tops 2 more lists

SmartAsset recently released a new study which found Hamilton County to be ranked #1 where people are best prepared for retirement. The study weighed four criteria: 401(k) performance, pension performance, local economic conditions (#1 in state), and access to financial advisors.

Another study by the same publication ranked the top places for small business owners to thrive. The study examined three factors: the percentage of people in a county with small business income, the proportion of that income to overall income and taxes paid by small business owners. Again. Hamilton County ranks #1 - beating dozens of top contenders. 

Fishers Medals Again

In the bustling Nickel Plate District of Fishers, Indiana, Tracy Gritters can recall a time when things looked very different.


“It was a two-lane road 17 years ago,” she said of the property around her boutique store, Gallery 116, where she has sold locally made goods since 2002. “We were worried about Target coming to town.” The retail giant eventually did — it's located about an 11-minute walk from her store — but the city's expansion hasn’t been the scenario she feared.

Fishers, which was named MONEY's Best Place to Live in 2017, officially upgraded from a town to a city and swore in its first mayor on January 1, 2015. Mayor Scott Faddness is still in office, and in the years since his inauguration, the city itself has been transformed.


The newly developed downtown area became the Nickel Plate District, now home to an outdoor amphitheatre, plenty of retail stores and restaurants, a brewery, luxury apartments, and a high-speed internet coworking space. Soon, The Yard — an upcoming 18-acre mixed-use development — will add even more amenities, including at least 15 highly anticipated restaurants, an incubator for start-up chefs, 250 apartments, and a Hyatt Place Hotel.



“We have everything we need right here,” said Gritters of the city, which is located about 20 miles northeast of Indianapolis. “We have great food, great shopping, [and] activities for the kids.”


Not only is the amped-up downtown increasing the entertainment value and sense of community for Fishers' residents, it’s bringing a lot of money into the young city’s economy. Fishers has seen $90 million worth of investments from four finished projects, and over the next few years it’s expecting another $170 million — $157 million of which will come from The Yard alone.


That kind of growth usually comes with growing pains, but the city appears to be handling it well, according to Gritters. (Fishers was one of the safest cities on our list as of 2018.) “Some of the people who have lived here longer than I have, they don’t like the traffic, but the city’s doing a good job of keeping up with the street developments and all the nuts and bolts of growing so fast.”


Employment is seeing the benefits, too. Job growth has expanded by an astounding 30.4% since 2010, according to Moody’s Analytics, and is projected to go up another 9.2% by 2023. The unemployment rate, meanwhile, was a low 2.7% in 2018 and the median household income was upwards of $104,300, which is even more impressive considering the low cost of living in Fishers.


Renters have it particularly good, but for anyone hoping to invest, now’s the time. The median sales price for a single family home was up 1.14% in 2018 to $263,500 — just about 2.5% times the median household income, commonly considered the rule of thumb for how much to spend on a home.


Overall, the future looks bright. “I love where [Fishers is] going to be,” says Gritters. “Because I think about our kids in 40 or 50 years. It’s going to just be beautiful.” — Prachi Bhardwaj

Indy-area concert venue ranked as world's top amphitheatre

The 24k-capacity music center (affectionately known as Deer Creek by locals for the past 30 years) finished 2018 as the top-ranked outdoor concert hall in the nation world. Also known as 'Ruoff' something-or-other to outsiders, it's home in Noblesville is nestled upon 228 beautiful acres in Hamilton County, recently ranked #1 place to live.

Selling over 588k tickets to 50+ shows during it's Summer Series, Indy outpaced Houston, Denver, SF, LA, DC, Detroit, Philly, Boston and even Berlin - all ranked in the top 10.

Indy's largest indoor venue, Lucas Oil Stadium, had one concert all year (Taylor Swift) which sold 55k+ tickets at 100% capacity.  

Indy an 'unlikely' hotbed of tech startups

This article originally appeared on Crunchbase. 

Salesforce’s $2.5 billion acquisition of email marketing startup ExactTarget in 2013 was a big deal. And for Indianapolis, it may have also catalyzed a burgeoning startup scene.

A number of former ExactTarget and Salesforce executives have gone on to start companies in the midwest city ExactTarget considered home. Former ExactTarget Co-Founder and CEO Scott Dorsey also launched a venture fund in the city as well.

In 2015, Dorsey launched High Alpha, a venture fund focused on investing in enterprise cloud companies that has already invested in more than two dozen startups. Another co-founder, Chris Baggott, started ClusterTruck, a fresh food delivery company in the city, the same year.

The central location, lower cost of living, and ability to hire talent for less money than other markets also makes the city appealing to founders and investors alike, Ziegler added.

“You can find direct flights to almost anywhere out of the Indianapolis airport,” he said. “And a recent study found that the city has one of the top five lowest rent to tech wage ratios. It’s a place where you can build a company capital efficiently. All these factors make for pretty interesting ingredients to build great companies, particular B2B tech companies.”

Indeed, in 2017, Inc. named Indianapolis as one of the “Top 6 Best Cities to Start a Business Right Now.” And in 2015, Fast Company ranked Indianapolis in its “Next Top 10 Cities for Tech Jobs.” And more recently, it named the city the tenth best for women in tech.

Edison Partners, which describes itself as a growth equity firm that invests in underserved markets and bootstrapped entrepreneurs, led financing rounds for two Indianapolis startups: Sigstr, a SaaS platform for employee email signature marketing and relationship intelligence, and Emplify, an employee engagement measurement company.

It put $2.35 million of a $4 million growth round in Sigstr, which the company will use to accelerate the rollout its newly released Pulse product and to scale sales and marketing. Sigstr has raised $11 million in funding since inception. 

Edison also put $3.5 million in a $7.5 million growth round in Emplify. The startup plans to use the injection of capital toward investing in engineering and developing a go to market strategy for its products. Cultivation Capital and Allos Ventures also put money in that round. The company has raised $10.5 million since it was founded in 2016.

Founded in 2014, Sigstr has 60 employees and nearly tripled its revenue growth and customer base over the last year. The company expects to grow an additional 150 percent in the fiscal year ending January 2019. It now works directly with 400 B2B companies across five continents, including Amazon, AT&T, Experian, GoHealth, and Snowflake Computing.

“Every company in the world runs an employee email system, with billions of emails being sent every day,” Bryan Wade, CEO of Sigstr, told Crunchbase News. “We saw a massive marketing opportunity to take over email signatures with every employee.”

For Wade—who formerly served as vice president of email product for ExactTarget, and as senior vice president and chief product officer for Salesforce—Sigstr’s ability to attract companies in any industry is a big advantage.

“There’s a lot of vertical and niche products out there, but it’s difficult to find a technology like this that every business in the world can use,” he said.

In July, Sigstr launched its new Pulse relationship marketing application that uses artificial intelligence to map and quantify the collective networks of all employees to better identify recipients, and send more targeted invitations and missives to appropriate customers and prospects.

“There’s so much potential for organizations to use relationship intelligence from employee email to unlock relationships and drive targeted marketing and sales efforts. Employee email is still the best predictor of business relationships,” Wade said. Ziegler agreed.

“We found that the use of relationship data to inform account-based marketing at the B2B level was sorely missing,” he told Crunchbase News. “Sigstr fills that hole and does in a very special way by unlocking the value of the email channel to drive revenue for B2B marketers.”

Naturally, Wade is also bullish on the Indianapolis startup scene.

“There is a renaissance happening here,” he said. “A couple of years ago, there were a dozen startups, and now there’s 70 or 80 in town. The city is becoming a hub for B2B technology and software as the access to capital has improved and a number of large software acquisitions in the city have created a pool of talented executives who have started companies.”

Best Suburb in America is...

Business Insider published a new ranking, proving once again which the best Suburb in the United States is. If you look closely at who landed at Numero Uno you'll see that not much has changed in the past decade or so.

Niche refreshed their calculations for 2018 due to the rising costs of big-city living and more millennials opting to steer away from suburbia. The major factors included to determine quality of living are: crime, unemployment rate, schools, new home price, income, amenities, and cost of living. 

America's Most Underrated City

It's that time of the year where Indianapolis takes center stage again - on ABC Sunday afternoon, to be specific. Forbes recently ran an article touting Indy as the most underrated, partly due to being the 35th largest city yet hangs with the elite, in terms of things like value, food, sports, steak, golf, and unique activities.  You might think it's weird to list both steak and food, plus golf and sports, but when you're ranked at the top of your class, you gotta give it its own press.

Sports: 

• #1 football stadium (LucasOil)
• #1 basketball stadium (Fieldhouse)
• #1 Superbowl experience (2012)
• #1 sporting event (Indy 500)
• #1 Final Four host (8 times)
• #1 NFL Combine host
• NBA All-Star 2021 2024 host
• BCS Championship 2022 host 
• Annual NCAA Championships for Swimming, Gymnastics, Track & Field. And best of all...

Golf

• Pete Dye courses (The Fort, The Brickyard, Maple Creek)
• PGA events (Crooked Stick)
• #2 city for public golf courses (Fishers)
• #1 rated public course (Eagle Creek) & only $25 w/ cart after 3pm. Speaking of value...

Value

• Top-10 hottest destination in 2018 (Conde Nast)
• Top-50 places to travel in 2017 (Travel and Leisure)
• Luxury hotels (Conrad, Alexander) cheaper than Nashville, Cincy, Minny, & KC
• #1 convention center 
• #1 airport in North America (ACI)
• mansion-like homes listed as the most affordable in the nation (sq/ft)
• #1 in downtown walkability, including covered skyway to hotels and...

Food

• Most Underrated Food City (Conde Nast)
• Top-7 most impressive city (Thrillist)
• Top-20 US Food city (Food & Wine)
• Top-15 Hottest Food Cities (Zagat)
• the Martha Hoover empire
• exploding brewery scene with award-winning craft beers (SunKing, DareDevil's LiftOff)
• the Kimbal Musk empire & farm-2-table movement, which may or may not include...

Steak

• Award-winning St. Elmo's
• Renowned: Prime 47, Char Blue, Red the Steakhouse
• Other Favorites: Shula’s, Ruth’s Chris, McCormick & Schmick’s, Morton’s, Capital Grille, Hyde Park Prime

Unique Activities

• Children's Museum, Medical History Museum and NCAA HQ
• Award-winning Indianapolis Zoo
• Fairbanks Art & Nature Park, Newfields (IMA), and Lilly House
• World's largest mini Marathon
• White River, Monon Trail, Pogues Run, Downtown Canal
• more war memorials than any other city outside DC, including the USS Indianapolis
• Eagle Creek, Geist Resevior

FANTASMA

If you're a stock investor, you've probably seen the FANG acronym being used. Google is now Alphabet so it needs a revision. Allow me to sprinkle some § flair on Jim Cramer's original by adding some other can't-pass-up tech stocks:

Facebook Amazon Netflix Tesla Apple Salesforce Microsoft Alphabet

So there you have it, FANTASMA. My new favorite word is actually a Spanish word for GHOST or PHANTOM.  Hmm, Indy happens to be home to a certain Pro Bowler who calls himself the Ghost. And he wears a spooky number that supposed to be unlucky. But the horseshoe hung upside-down represents luck and the guy feeding him the ball is named Luck! Just like (another "Indy")  ND up-state uses the clover, which when found as 4 petals (Four Horsemen? Horses again!) means luck! And a Leprechaun with his lucky charms and a pot of gold!! 

What does all this mean?
Duh. Bet on Colts to win the Superbowl. Almost all the pieces are there (still missing rOL and ILB) and we've got the GOAT (AV) and Ghost (TY). The Vegas odds are at +4000. Put $125 down to get $5k? That's the price of a single lower-level seat. Are you willing to make that sacrifice?