In this post, we will outline the features we’ve released for the consumer side of CityFALCON so far this year. In our 6th year of business, our product is really taking shape for web and mobile app users, and we are excited about what we have created so far and for the near future. If you’re interested in the enterprise and API side, see this post.

 

Expansion of Premium Content

We started offering Premium content last year, with about 225 publications that provided us paywalled or non-public content for our users. This number has since expanded to about 500. We continue to work on partnering with other publications to expand our paywall-free and non-public content offerings.

Only Gold users receive paywall-free and non-public content on the site without advertisements, with the full-text directly on the platform. Otherwise, one must click through to the publisher site, which may be cluttered with advertisements and distractions. 

Some of the most popular Premium publications include Fitch, the Washington Post, HuffPost, The Economist, and Xinhua News. You can browse the partial list to see others. These are not all 5000+ sources available on CityFALCON! The partial list only includes high-profile Premium sources that provide full-text, paywall-free, no-advert content.

Content by Locations 

We now let you track nearly 50,000 locations, from areas like Wall Street and Silicon Valley to cities, states/provinces, countries, and continents. Browse locations in the Directory to find information relevant to your city, your business’s target market, and the places where the companies you invest in operate. 

With global events, like Covid-19, you might even use Locations to track how countries are reacting and faring differently during the pandemic.

Shareable Watchlists

We have had Shareable Watchlists for a while, but they only worked for users already signed in. Now you can share your watchlist with anyone, whether they are CityFALCON users or not, and they can see the content. This is great for sharing information in a single link to coworkers, who may need to track certain topics. 

In our Popular Topics post, we created Shareable Watchlists for many different categories. You can make your own, though, and share through the mobile app (web coming soon):

Share your watchlists to spread the wealth

Infinity Feed

On both the web and mobile apps, the stories and content feed load continuously so users can read as much as they want. Last year we only supplied a limited amount of information, and users, especially our news junkies (which includes our CEO), were eager for more content.

On the web, the feed scrolls down forever, automatically extending as you near the bottom, similar to Facebook. On the mobile apps, the Infinity Feed works the same way for stories in the list, but it can also be used in the Individual Story mode, when users swipe the screen to move on to the next story.

578 of 600 stories – and they’ll just keep loading!

 

Advanced Filters (Time and Sources)

During the first half of this year, we made it easier to refine the results in your feed, and we expanded the options for filtering considerably.

With Advanced Time Filters, we’ve 

  1. Increased the number of preset filters
  2. Enabled users to freely set the number of minutes, hours, days, weeks, or months
  3. Permitted free choice of any date range

As long as the time period you set is allowed under your subscription plan, you’ll be able to be much more precise now.

Specify time precisely

You can be much more precise in your source selection, too. We still allow bulk selections (major, other publications, Twitter, reports), but now you can narrow down the sources by publication. 

The most common usage is to select publications you want to see. You can focus on a country by only enabling publications from that country. Some users want to select publications based on their preferences for reading a style of content. Others think certain publications cover events better for their particular market segment or audience. 

Conversely, you may block publications if you think they’re too biased or do not accurately cover a specific topic. 

When choosing publications, they are organised as Major, Other, and Premium. Note that Premium publications may also fall under the Major and Other categories. If you want to see only Premium content as described above – that is, paywalled or non-public content that is displayed in full text on CityFALCON – you will have to enable the setting in your filters.

Choose whether to allow or block publications individually

Archives Online From 01 January 2018

We keep a lot of data in our system. However, before this year, the design of our infrastructure was not robust enough to deliver data more than a month old without severe delays. Through quite a bit of R&D, we created processes that allow us to look up and deliver older data more efficiently, so now we can provide data all the way back to 01 January 2018.

Only Gold users will be able to access the entire archive, and they can actually check the entire timeframe. Silver users can check up to a year old. Of course, using the Advanced Time Filter mentioned above, any time period within these constraints is also allowed. For instance, Gold users can check 01 April 2018 to 09 June 2018 if they so choose.

We have data reaching back to 2014, which we will start to bring online as we improve our efficiency in finding, sorting, and delivering the older data. 

Similar Stories

The latest, and maybe greatest, feature to be released so far this year for mobile and web is our Similar Stories Grouping. It is quite a major feature, so much so that we even wrote an entire blog post on Similar Stories Grouping.

Similar Stories uses advanced, proprietary machine learning to compare each individual piece of content that we receive at CityFALCON for similarity. Content includes news stories, Tweets, and reports. Each piece is compared to every other piece using over 512 dimensions, such as author and location. Of course, with over 500 dimensions, some may seem like odd combinations and may not mean much to humans, but the correlations Big Data algorithms can draw may uncover some subtle similarities. 

After all the content is compared, it is clustered into groups with similar content. Then, AI chooses the most representative of the group (the centroid), and this piece of content is marked as the header of the story card. All of the other content in the group is considered Similar Stories and placed below the header on the same story card.

The two immediately obvious uses are 1) to cut research time by only looking at the header stories and 2) to gather all similar content together for deeper research, searching for nuance in the slightly different wordings. Combining multiple sources in one place lets you see how some sources view topics differently depending on their audience, too.

The similarity algorithm even works across 16 languages! This means you will be able to see foreign language stories that match the concepts in the header, even when they’re different languages.

Grouping similar content from various sources and in multiple languages

On our Knowledge Base, you can learn how to tweak Similar Stories settings.

Mobile Layout Customisation

Screen space is extremely valuable real estate on mobile screens due to their much smaller size. The CityFALCON mobile app now lets you change the layout to better fit your needs and preferences. 

You can hide or display images and descriptions, switch between rows and tiles, and turn Similar Stories on and off through the News Feed Layout section. To change the layout, find the layout option in the usual stories filters menu.

Free Trials and Discounts

With the disruption in the economy in the first half of 2020, we have seen a spike in interest in the markets. We also understand that many people are wary of their economic situation and job security, so they are hesitant to try new subscriptions. In consideration of the circumstances, we are offering one-month free trials of Silver for anyone interested and getting started in the markets.

Use this coupon code when you sign up for Silver to avail of a one-month free trial:

BEATCOVID19

 

We offer special discounts for members of specific groups. To receive these benefits, identity verification is required (contact us):

  • Healthcare and non-profit workers receive special benefits, a token of our appreciation for work that is not always well-funded or well-compensated
  • Academia also receives special discounts, as has been our policy since we started offering paid plans

Personal Use of the API

We have also reached our goal of providing personal API access. Anyone interested in programmatically using CityFALCON data can now access it without being an enterprise customer. 

The personal plan starts from $20 a month for academia, healthcare, and nonprofit members, while it is $40 per month at regular price. You receive up to 10,000 calls per month and the responses include the title, description, and CityFALCON score. 

Read more on the full blog post on Personal API access. If you are interested in updates and released features for the enterprise API, see this article.

Upcoming Releases and Final Remarks

We are proud of the progress our team has made in the past 6 years of CityFALCON. We are very excited to finally see some of the more compute-intense and technically-sophisticated aspects, like Similar Stories, come online, too.

Already on the API, we provide filings, sentiment, and NLU entity extraction. The release on the consumer side tends to take a while longer because we need to create intuitive designs and get them working on different browsers and different mobile apps.

However, the data is already available, and we expect at least filings and sentiment to be released for consumers later this year.

If you are not yet a CityFALCON user, sign up for a month-long trial of Silver with the discount code from above. You can compare plans and choose one on our Pricing page.

Those interested in using the Personal level of the API may contact us to set up their account. Note that the personal level does not grant access to sentiment, NLU extraction, or similar stories. 

Similarly, if you are in academia, healthcare, or a non-profit organisation, start a conversation with us to discuss your eligibility for other discount offers.