How to follow topics
When you follow a topic, you will get weekly email update reports on your topic. We call these email update reports Weekly360s. Weekly360s send you updates on new venture fundings, research, market estimates, news & blogs, and patents.
For each finding, Weekly360s tell you where (= in which of the topics you're following) it was found. In the example below...
...the first finding is relevant to the topics "Cobots", "Additive Manufacturing", "E-Waste", and "Industry 4.0". That is, the user is following each of these topics, and this first article is relevant to all of these topics.
The update emails you will get from Mergeflow
Once you start following topics, you will get five Weekly360s every week (unless there are no new findings, in which case you don't receive Weekly360s):
(1) Venture Capital Investments
This Weekly360 tells you about all the latest VC investments across your topics.
(2) Market Estimates
The Market Estimates Weekly360 informs you about new market estimates (market segments, sizes, and growth rates) from across your topics.
(3) R&D
The R&D Weekly360 sends you new scientific publications from journals, conference proceedings, and preprint servers.
If a finding (e.g. a venture funding or an R&D paper) is relevant to more than one of your topics, this will be indicated in your Weekly360. This helps you discover connections between your topics. You can see an example of this below:
In this R&D Weekly360, the green labels indicate the topics to which each finding is relevant. The first finding is relevant to "Wearables" and to "Machine Learning", for example.
(4) News & Blogs
In the News & Blogs Weekly360, you get the latest mainstream news and tech blog articles from across your topics.
(5) Patents
In the Patents Weekly360, you get patents from across your topics that Mergeflow has received for the first time via the European Patent Office's updates. Typically, the priority date of these patents is about 18 months prior to this publication date (in theory, a patent applicant could decide to publish a patent at or just after the priority date, but almost all applicants use this 18 months period before they have to publish their patent).
If you want to learn more about how Mergeflow deals with patent information, please read this article.
How you can get dedicated updates for individual topics
Sometimes you might want to get individual topic Weekly360s, in addition to the "general" ones described above. This might be useful, for instance, if you have a general interest in e.g. 20 topics but are actively working on three of these topics. In this case, you might want to get dedicated updates for your three "focus topics", in addition to the more general Weekly360s described above.
In order to get individual topic Weekly360s (we call them Focus360s), go to "My topics". You can get there either from the top menu...
...or from the "My topics" tile:
Then, you can toggle on or off your topic (by clicking the bell icon), and select a day of the week for your Focus360:
If you use Mergeflow as part of a team
If you are part of a team in Mergeflow (see our Team subscription plan for more details), your Weekly360s will also include findings from across your team's topics. But these team findings only show up in your own Weekly360s if they are also relevant to at least one of your own topics. So if all your team members follow very distinct topics, and there is no overlap between your topics, you do not spam each other's email inboxes with irrelevant findings.
What if I don't want to follow a topic anymore?
If at some point you do not want to follow a topic anymore, go to "My Topics", and unfollow the topic.