VentureBeat

Everyone knows that meetings are boring. Not everyone knows their true cost. Today, Payscale, the salary comparison service, launches Meeting Miser, a widget designed make these costs plain.

To get started, you enter in your company’s location and the jobs of all of the meeting’s participants. Based on the median salary for those jobs at those locations, Meeting Miser calculates how much every second and minute of the meeting costs. You can use sliders to adjust the salaries to their real level, and then press “go.” It’s simple, fast, and easy, and now, when you have long board meetings with all of your VCs, you can show them how much additional money they’re dropping on your company as they listen to you talk.

At the end of the meeting, you can send yourself or others a summary of these costs with a couple of clicks. There are other, similar tools, like those from DeepFun and EffectiveMeetings, out there, but none of them have Payscale’s wealth of data behind them, nor are they as simple to use. We talked to Mark Mader, CEO of online spreadsheet company, SmartSheet, and he says that since first encountering the widget, he has used it regularly. He says that it has made him and his team conscious of wasting time and helps them stay focused on the agenda.

Payscale is pushing the product as a “viral productivity tool,” but, despite Mark’s endorsement, it’s hard to take it seriously, and while we can imagine that it would fit in with a handful of goofy start-up cultures, mass adoption is probably not in the cards. It seems mostly like a fun little toy best used once or twice to make a point, then relegated to the large dustbin of clever but relatively useless widgets.

And, really, is this what Payscale recently raised $10.3 million to do?

Payscale is based in Seattle.

PayScale, a Seattle start-up that shares salary information with Web users who share their own, has just released some useful tools for job searchers.

First, there’s the widget pictured here, that folks like us at VentureBeat can place on their job boards (we’re considering doing this). Even more useful is their new feature that pops up salary information about specific jobs as searchers scroll over job listings. See below for an example of a pop-up when you scroll over a listing for a software engineer.

PayScale, a Seattle start-up with about $10 million in backing from Trinity Ventures, Fluke Venture Partners and Madrona Venture Group is taking advantage of a flight by users online when they’re doing searches for important things like jobs. These Web widgets make it more nimble than the public company Salary.com, which does not solicit salary information directly from people, and instead relies on industry surveys. While in some ways you can consider Salary.com surveys more rigorous and vetted (less prone to capricious Web users submitting info anonymously), they do have conform to rigid categorization — and this often doesn’t allow for consideration of specific skills. By contrast, PayScale can show information for an advanced programmer, but also show how that changes if they know AJAX. It takes into consideration things like location, company type and size, experience, education, skills.

There are other players offering salary information, such as Indeed, but they are scraping information from job listings; it doesn’t come from people actually employed. There’s Payscroll, yet to launch. Finally, there’s Salaryscout which, like PayScale, solicits salary information directly over the Web, and in some ways has more Web 2.0 features. It has RSS and commenting, for example. PayScale says it doesn’t have such features yet because it feels they haven’t gone mainstream, and it has focused on deals like it announced today with CNET — integrating the PayScale pop-up (again, example below). PayScale also boasts impressive research, and has a sophisticated search.

It will also be unveiling more ways to slice and dice whether jobs are well compensated. Its research takes into account multiple variables like commute time, for example, so human resource managers know that if someone is traveling 45 miles to get to a job, well, it must be pretty attractive, and highly paid. The manager may conclude they could offer less for someone living 15 miles. PayScale makes money by charging users for more detailed compensation information, and by selling information to HR managers at 3,000 companies (your data is kept anonymous).