Best Buy, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard and others are having their own employees participate in “prediction markets” to gain insight into product demand, store opening dates, and other future events, the “NY Times” reported. The notion that the opinion of a large group of well-informed individuals will be more accurate than one or a few “experts” was popularized by James Surowiecki’s book “The Wisdom of Crowds,” and is now being tested by dozens of major corporations, including Google, Cisco Systems and General Mills. Small service providers like Consensus Point, NewsFutures and Xpree (since renamed Crowdcast) are assisting companies that don’t have the in-house expertise to establish prediction markets on their own.