Collective Intelligence - Google

According to Wikipedia, Collective Intelligence is a shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making in bacteria, animals, humans and computer networks. Google harnesses Collective Intelligence through its PageRank (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank) algorithm. As the name implies, it utilizes a special system that ranks sets of hyperlinked documents based on their relevance. Basically, the greater number of links to a specific website, the higher that website gets ranked by Google. Using this algorithm, Google is able to gather information from all over the Web, thereby harnessing Collective Intelligence.

E-Commerce

Bestbuy.com is well known as being a Business-2-Consumer (B2C) company. It purchases goods from other companies (HP, Dell, Sony, etc.) and sells them to consumers through its many retail channels. However, BestBuy also has a form of Business-to-Business (B2B) called Best Buy For Business (http://www.bestbuybusiness.com) whereby they market products to small businesses. The viability of this business model is pretty evident through BestBuy's success. Leveraging both the B2C and B2B models allows Best Buy to capture more of the market.