In another example demonstrated at the IBM/Lotus Development Center, a real-estate collaboration application drew together Google maps, a longitude-latitude widget, real-estate listings and foreclosure data.

With it, a realtor and customers can confer over properties, and if one of the participants clicked on a particular property flagged on a map, the screens of all participants would refresh to show the listing for that property and perhaps a satellite view of it.

Each change to the page would be pulled from separate sources on the Web and assembled by each machine in the conference, Boloker says. An IBM widget sends notification of the changing event that takes place when one participant clicks on a property and the rest of the machines duplicate the change on their own, he says.

The platform relies on an XMPP server that a business would own or access via a service, and each participant would log in to a session via user name and password.

Both the Reuters and real-estate demonstrations included audio and video running peer-to-peer between two MacBook PRO laptops, with the platform supporting both VGA and HD video. The Blue Spruce demonstration works with the Safari browser running a 5MB client, and researchers are working to move it to Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers as well, according to Boloker.