The program, called Meeting Miser, calculates the a meeting’s cost down to the cents per minute. Meeting cost calculators are nothing new, but Meeting Miser incorporates real salary data from their site to tally the hourly cost for you. As a bonus, it also works pretty well on the iPhone.

All you have to do is give the program info about where you’re located and the titles of the people at the meeting. Just for kicks I calculated a theoretical meeting between two corporate C-class officials and their VC in San Francisco. Turns out their meeting burns about a venti Starbuck’s latte per minute.

But for some, Meeting Miser is more than just an idle curiosity or analytical overkill. SmartSheet has actually been using the program to keep their eye on the ball and cut out unnecessary meetings.

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PayScale has remixed the data to launch a new service called GigZig, a search engine that tells workers what kinds of career paths a job fits into. The engine takes a job title and spits two columns of positions with average salary statistics. One column lists the most common jobs a person with the queried title had 5 years ago. The other column lists the most common current jobs for people who had the queried title 5 years ago. All the data is based on the 25% of users that tell PayScale what their previous positions were.

An example search is “Product Manager”. Five years ago most current Product Managers were Assistant Product Managers. The most common current position for people who were Product Managers five years ago is Marketing Manager. The results on each side are organized by frequency, denoted by the number of yellow people icons filled in. Three icons means 20% or more people had that position, while two icons on down mean less than 8%.

PayScale plans to implement other reuses of their data in the near future, including one that should excite college freshmen, what degrees lead to what jobs.

See our coverage last year of SalaryScout, a competitor.

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But the idea stuck in my head, and when I got a call from Seattle-based PayScale I was happy to learn that this company had been doing exactly what wageexchange promised. This isn’t a new company – John Cook at the Seattle PI has written about them, as have other local Seattle writers. But it’s very useful for people searching for a job or trying to negotiate a raise, and I’m not sure we need a new startup to improve on the service.

Users go through a process of disclosing detailed information about their job function and compensation, and add it to what PayScale says is the “world’s largest database of salary information” (300,000 new profiles are added each month). The user can then access detailed salary information in the database, including custom reports based on salary, bonus, commission, hourly rates, health and vacation benefits.

The basic service is free, and Payscale generates revenue by upselling users to premium accounts and selling access to aggregate data to third parties.

This is a useful service that gives significant value back to the user for spending time adding content to their database. Payscale has raised $10.6 million in venture capital over two rounds. Investors include Trinity Ventures, Madrona Venture Group, Fluke Venture Partners and Buerk Dale Victor.

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