News 103 Minutes Before Wires Via Automated Forum Reading

For April Fools Day this month, Tesla tweeted that it was introducing a wristwatch, the "Model W":

The announcement briefly sent Tesla stock up 0.75%, some suspect due to automated trading reading news wires. So automated trading based on news wires is old hat.

But now one company, Accern, touts technology that scans forum postings and claims to have detected the news of Wal-Mart switching their credit card processor from Discover over to Mastercard -- and to have detected this information 103 minutes before it hitting the conventional news wires.

Many have scoffed in the past at the value of "sentiment analysis", but here is a hard dollars-and-centers example. It certainly sounds easier than image interpretation and humor detection.