✈ Flyover Future Friday! Fun, food, football and fall fever – September 6, 2019
Fall (and Friday!) is in the air ...
Today's itinerary: Professional drone racing; robot pizza delivery coming to flyover campuses; Big 10 quiz; and 3 winning city stories
September 6, 2019
FRIDAY FUN WITH ROBOTS
Pro drone racing is a thing 
Image by Harald Landsrath via Pixabay
Humans being humans, it was only a matter of time before we discovered fire, created plastic, invented drones, and started racing them on a professional racing circuit. And that first drone racing circuit landed in Minnesota on August 22. That’s when the Drone Racing League and Allianz Field in St. Paul hosted the 2019 DRl Allianz World Championship, which will air on NBC and Twitter on November 6.
For those of you who are wondering if drone racing is where reprobate tween boys tie bees to strings and race them in the backyard, you are not wrong. But this is a different kind of drone: the kind you usually hear about involved in photography, spying, and occasionally, bombing. Turns out they are also super fun to watch race.
In drone races, “pilots” with names like “Phluxy,” “Fat Kid,” and “Nurk” don goggles that relay live video feeds from cameras mounted on their drones and race each other at top speeds while navigating through a series of brightly colored gates. If you can’t wait until November to watch the top pros go at it in Minnesota, just search for drone races on YouTube.
And lest you dismiss drone racing as a puerile endeavor, take note that eSports—the catch-all term for people watching other people play games—is projected to generate $1.5 billion in revenue in 2020.
Robot pizza delivery service raises $40 million 
Image via Starship Technologies on Youtube
If robots have stolen your job and you’re thinking about picking up a gig delivering pizzas, you might want to rethink that plan. That’s because a company called Starship Technologies recently secured $40 million in funding to create thousands of pizza-delivering robots.
The company has been testing its robots all over the world and recently delivered its 100,000th pizza. Now it has set its sights on college campuses, which have the perfect combination of navigable walking paths and smartphone-savvy students. Win-win. The robots are going to invade campuses across the country in the next two years, including Purdue University and University of Pittsburgh.
Starship has a jump on the competition by virtue of having so thoroughly tested its robots and perfecting the autonomous technology. There are a lot of potential competitors, though, including everyone from Domino’s to Ford to Amazon, as well as companies hoping to deliver groceries, consumer items, and—isn’t it inevitable?—the aforementioned weed. Welcome to the future.
IN-FLIGHT ENTERTAINMENT
Welcome to "Name that Flyover U!" 
Happy Friday, football fans! It's that time and the Big Ten conference kicks off tomorrow. If you're a fan, you should be as excited as a dog with two tails.
To celebrate, we decided to put a slight twist on our ever-popular "Name that Flyover City" quiz and play "Name that Flyover U"!
Let's get right down to fun and games with today's enigmatic queries:
Want those answers?
Can't stand football, but still gotta know?
HIGH FLYING CITIES
Tulsa's Gathering Place wins national accolades 
A new park in Tulsa is winning rave reviews. Gathering Place, a $465 million, 66-acre park on the Arkansas River, has been lauded by publications all across the land for its innovation, design aesthetic, and commitment to accessibility. Time Magazine named Gathering Place one of its “World’s Greatest Places 2019,” USA Today named it the “Best New Attraction in the Nation,” and National Geographic included it on its “Mind-bending Playgrounds” list.
Pop-up retail as an economic development solution in Indy Empty downtown storefronts send an undesirable message about urban centers. Meanwhile, independent artists and retailers are always looking for new ways to market themselves. Enter St’Artup317.
For the 2019 season, vendors included Blacksheep Collective, a faith-based apparel line operated by artist Byron Elliot, and Witty by Codi, a couture clothing boutique. “My biggest opportunity was being able to stay in the space for an extended lease of 18 months at a discounted rate,” said Codi Banks about her once pop-up, now store.
Other projects included a meditation studio, and Comfort Option, a store that sells locally crafted custom mattresses, and numerous fine artists. Millennials flock to Madison Where do you go when you already have all the trophies? Wisconsin. At least that’s where a ton of Millennials are headed. On the heels of a recent study showing that Millennials are flocking to Oshkosh, Sheboygan, and Wausau comes news that Madison is the No. 2 relocation destination in the country for people born between 1980 and 1998.
PUDDLE HOPS
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