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Text-only General FAQ (16 questions)

Cory Sarver
  • Updated

 

What if the pictures in the guide are too small?

If the pictures we've used throughout the tutorial are too small within the article, you can right click on them and open them in a new tab. Zendesk resizes them so they fit better on the page, but sometimes they do appear a bit small. When opening them on a second tab, you should be able to see the original size, which will be larger and easier to read.

 

What is CityFALCON?

CityFALCON is a personalised financial news platform that aggregates, curates, and ranks news by relevance from several sources. We receive and process millions of stories and tweets from the web every day. In the processing stage, we leverage machine learning and natural language processing technologies to understand what those stories mean. Next, we decide which stories are most relevant to which users, based on their profiles, preferences, and needs. This is all done algorithmically, in real time, and continuously.

Our proprietary tech gives you falcon-like (in)sight into the markets. You only receive the most relevant information rather than combing through mountains of irrelevant news stories and content.

 

What is a CityFALCON Score?

The CityFALCON Score is a measure of relevance, ranging from 0% to 100%, of a particular story for your profile and the topics you are tracking. The higher the percentage, the higher the relevancy of a story to you specifically. Its accuracy improves as we learn more about you, your preferences, your interests, and your activity on the site.

You can watch a video explaining this concept here, too.

 

What are Sector Categories?

Sector categories are a CityFALCON classification system that incorporates contemporary business categories beyond the traditional arrangement of economic sectors and industries. Sector categories bring economic classification into the 21st century with deep visibility into areas like Electric Vehicles, AI as as Service (AIaaS), and Crypto Mining Rigs, which may not fit well into traditional economic and business classification systems. More traditional groupings like Technology and Finance are still available.

 

Why can the same story have two different CityFALCON scores?

The same story published in different places can have two different CityFALCON scores for several reasons. The main reasons for a different score, however, are the time of publication, the source, and the visibility of that particular story. Although not a general rule, being published earlier, from a more trusted source, and having more views are features that tend to yield higher scores.

 

Why am I getting news that is not related to the topic I am searching for?

Our engine may consider some stories relevant for your profile while not being directly related to the topic you are searching for. That could indicate a hidden connection is present, but in some instances, the engine is just flat out wrong. In those cases, you can click the Irrelevant button to help the engine learn. This will allow us to provide an even better experience for you in future. That's because our algorithms are perfectionists and feel bad when they make mistakes, so they adjust their connections right away when you tell them they're wrong.

 

Why is the number of watchlists limited?

The watchlist is one of the key features of CityFALCON in providing an improved experience when tracking stories and provides us with important information to personalise news for you. Having more watchlists or more topics per list incurs higher overhead costs for us, so we limit the number we allow for unregistered users and registered Basic plan users.

Naturally, people want fewer restrictions on the number of watchlists or topics they can follow. To address this demand while remaining a sustainable business, we offer Premium plans, which allow up to 200 topics per watchlist and 9999 watchlists. 

 

How can I check the news for individual topics in my watchlists?

Topics can be individually selected in your watchlist, at the right of the page on desktop or by tapping on the topic in the bar above stories on the My Stories tab on mobile.

When you select a single topic, you will see news related only to that topic. Other topics may appear incidentally, but that is only because they are mentioned alongside the topic you've selected.

For example, if you've selected only the stock Google, you will only see stories related to Google (unless there is a story about Apple and Google together). Every selected topic will be displayed, so choosing more topics means more stories.

If you are familiar with Boolean search, this means that selecting a few of the big tech companies would result in a query equivalent to "google OR apple OR microsoft OR amazon OR facebook".

 

How do I follow or filter news in languages other than English?

Our default setting is to provide you with news in all languages, but you might want to single out a specific language or filter out unnecessary ones. You can access language preferences through the Story Filters on desktop and mobile.

Naturally there will be more results in some languages than others, but if you think there should be some results and you see none, please let us know through our Contact Form and we will find out why.

 

How does CityFALCON personalise my news feed?

CityFALCON personalises your news feed through information that you provide us under the personalisation menu, through feedback provided by you through our curation features, and through some additional user actions that you may perform while using our platform.

All that data is collected and fed into our algorithms, which can then make informed decisions about what to show you. The more information you generate for them, the better their decisions will be.

But don't worry, your privacy is still safe with us. We personally don't like others snooping around in our own preferences and actions, so we adhere to a strict privacy policy to protect your privacy, too.


I already use another news aggregator, why should I try CityFALCON?

CityFALCON provides you personalised news based on your profile as a user. This is accomplished by analysing your interaction with content and your explicit choice of user segment. Most other aggregators do not serve content based on personalised needs but on keyword matches.

Furthermore, we provide content from thousands of source and millions of Tweets in multiple languages, a factor that differentiates us from other aggregators. Often Twitter is excluded and only a single language is availabe. Moreover, our databases are carefully curated specifically for finance, whereas some news sources are much broader.

We also provide multiple tools that allow you to derive more value from the news, such as our trending feature, the CityFALCON score, curation tools, simple and complex search, and more. 

Plus, because we are a young and growing company, we have many analytics and other features in our pipeline. These will help to widen the gap between our services and others like Google Finance or Yahoo Finance, like displaying the full text of stories without advertisements from us or the publishers. See our upcoming features on our Premium pricing page.


How does CityFALCON make money? Is my data safe?

CityFALCON makes money through API access fees and user subscription fees. Your data is in no way related to the content provided in the API, and the data you provide as a user, through all means (when registering, curating stories, etc.), is only used to provide your own user account an improved experience. We do not sell user data and your data is fully protected. If you want the legal details, check out our Terms of Service and our Privacy Policy.


Why do I need to register to check some stories and other features?

Registering allows us to gather the inputs required to provide you with personalised content. Without registering, the content you receive is the same as every other unregistered user (with the same filters enabled). That means the experience you have will be less optimal than that which we can provide to registered users. If you use the service unregistered, you also get limited access to features like trending, curation, and visualisation of the stories.

Registering is totally free and you can do that quickly here with just a name and email address.


Are my changes synced across mobile and desktop?

Short answer, yes. Long answer, yes, and here's an explanation:

All of your preferences and saved data, like watchlists and personas, reside on our servers, not on your devices. So, whenever you make a change in the mobile app, it will appear in the desktop website, and vice versa. It is all stored "in the cloud".

Using an analogy to real, physical clouds, two people can see the same cloud from different places on the ground. Any changes that happen to that cloud, like lightning lighting it up, are seen by both people at the same time. It is the same with our system (and any cloud system, really). When you change something from your mobile phone, the cloud changes, and thus the desktop version also sees the change.

Please note you might have to refresh the page or restart the mobile app in order for some changes to appear.


What's the difference between pressing Irrelevant, Dislike, and Hide?

When marking your opinion about content, three of the buttons seem somewhat similar: the Dislike button, the Irrelevant button, and the Hide button. Each has a different function, though.

Dislike

The dislike button influences popularity and counteracts the like button. The cumulative number of people who press one or the other helps us determine which stories should be served to whom. If many people with similar profiles to yours press the like button, it is more probable the story will appear in your feed.

If you press the dislike button, the article will remain visible, and your choice of like or dislike will persist, even after refreshing the page or logging out and coming back. In the future, when many users with profiles similar to yours dislike another piece of content, that particular story or tweet might not make it to your news feed at all.

Hide

This button hides the story for a time period and decreases its CityFALCON relevancy score for you. If you find something you don't like or need, press hide. 

Irrelevant

This button will make the story or tweet disappear permanently and mark it as irrelevant to your search results. This helps teach our algorithms and personalise your results more, because we can learn what you find relevant and irrelevant. If many people are marking an item irrelevant, we know the algorithm made a mistake and can adjust it.

 

How do I unsubscribe from your email list?

The easiest way to unsubscribe would be by clicking the unsubscribe link at the bottom of any email we send you. However, if you want to adjust market update emails, you can change the frequency, turn them off completely, or change which topics are included in the emails. To do this, go to the Manage Account / Preferences tab then Notifications. You can also see this expanded answer with screenshots if you need more help.

 

How do I request the data you have about me?

We take privacy very seriously. You can request the data we store on you - not much - on the account page. See this walkthrough article for step-by-step directions.

 

I don't see any content. What should I do?

Sometimes you use very strict filters to cut out the noise then switch to another topic that receives less attention but forget to relax your filters. Suddenly, you have no content. This also happens when you hide lesser-populated tabs from view. We warn you when this happens and you can re-enable tabs and relax filters to see content again.