Actually, someone recommended Jeff Kreeftmeijer's work, when I was working on this (an old colleague). I liked the way he did this, so yes... his work was very inspiring.

But most of my inspiration on how to do this came from the Node.JS knockout. Those guys are really awesome.

I'm also working on something similar for a while now, check http://screenr.com/DDk

I used Node.JS, ExpressJS, Socket.IO and CouchDB (I should have used redis actually, but these things were familiar to me). I'm not trying to prove this is the newest, most greatest thing. I'm trying to get an internship at Valve.