This week’s nugget comes courtesy of Business Week, which describes a new way to calculate the cost of meetings. Payscale.com has launched Meeting Miser, which utilizes the Web sites’s database of 10 million income profiles to estimate meeting participants’ salaries. A user enters attendees’ job titles and regional location, which enables an electronic meter to calculate a collective “cost per second.” The meter can also be projected alongside PowerPoint slides which, you guessed it, can help energize a ho-hum presentation.

meetpete has been a cheerleader for CIC’s Accepted Practices Exchange (APEX) since its inception nearly a decade ago. With the recent acceptance of the Contracts Report, content development is near completion. Initial doubts about industrywide adaption and implementation have been eased by quantum advances that enable once-incompatible operating systems to speak to one another. Kudos to the the APEX Technology Advisory Council, chaired by E.J. Siwek, for its dogged success in “herding cats” to create a compatible platform.

While inarguably the meeting industry’s most ambitious collective initiative to date, adoption of the recommendations of CIC’s Accepted Practices Exchange (APEX) has been painfully slow. One hopeful sign is the recent appointments of Christie Hicks and Maura Allen Gast to the APEX Commission. Hicks, senior vice president of global sales for Starwood Hotels, is a highhly-regarded consensus-builder among customer groups; Gast, executive director of the Irving (TX) CVB, is the current chair-elect of Destination Marketing Association International (DMAI). Expect these high-profile appointments to accelerate consensus and buy-in for the APEX program.

When the industry’s APEX (Accepted Practices Exchange) Technology Advisory Council began work more than three years ago, it discovered more than 7,000 different fields of information involved in a 250-person meeting. Completion of a “data map” by year-end 2007 will mean that no matter what proprietary software system is being used, computers will be able to speak the same language.

Here’s hoping APEX can do the same for the Middle East.