Rizzo Research International, Inc. has opened a focus group facility in New York City’s Flatiron district. The facility includes large and small observation rooms and state-of-the-art audio/video including equipment for simultaneous translation of multilingnal focus groups.

TMP Milestone has changed its name to Milestone. The company’s address is now P.O. Box 120, Sherbom, Mass.

BRX/Global, a Rochester, N.Y., research firm, has announced that Tokyu Agency, a Japanese ad agency, has been appointed the exclusive licensee for BRX/Global’s Brand Equity Systems. The system enables an advertiser to monitor the value of a brand name and to predict the effect of various marketing activities on that value.

Youth Marketing Solutions has moved to a new location in the Cincinnati area. The new address is 7599 Legendary Lane, West Chester, Ohio.

The VideoConferencing Alliance Network (VCAN), an organization of videoconferencing centers, has added nine new members. VCAN now has centers is Atlanta, Boston, Char!otte, Chicago, Cincinnati, Detroit, Houston, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Stamford, Tampa and Washinpon D.C.

In December, Market Facts, Arlington Heights, Ill., signed the largest research contract in its 50-yearhistory. The customer satisfaction research contract, worth about $4.7 million over 15 months, is part of an ongoing program designed to help the U.S. Postal Service improve the quality of service provided to its residential customers.

Paper submitted. The winning paper, "Benchmarking Readership Levels in The New Study of Media and Markets to The Survey of American Readership," was written by Marty Frankel, Joe Agresti and Dan Mallet. The paper describes the process used to assure conformity in print audience levels between the two sample databases used in Simmons’ redesigned methodology.

The David K. Hardin Memorial Endowment in Market Research has been created at Elmhurst College through a $1 million gift from the David K. Hardin Generativity Trust. The Trust was established by Dr. David K. Hardin, the late chairman and CEO of Market Facts, Inc., to carry out some of his deeply held goals: the preservation of the Earth and biodiversity; the creation of jobs in developing countries; and to honor his business interests in market research. The endowment will create The David K. Hardin Institute for Market Research at Elmhurst, which will be a catalyst for developing courses that contribute to the curriculum of the College’s Center for Business and Economics, and special programs for a variety of audiences in the area of market research. Each year, at least one Elmhurst student will be appointed "The David K. Hardin Fellow" and undertake an internship with Market Facts will receiving a merit scholarship.

Quality Controlled Services, St. Louis, has opened a new telephone survey center in Farmington Hills, Mich., a suburb of Detroit. The center features 50 CRT telephone interviewing stations equipped with predictive dialing. It also features digitized voice recording for verbatim responses. The center has a focus group suite equipped with FocusVision for live transmission of focus groups. Dianne Flock will serve as branch manager of the new facility.

IriS (InternationalResearch InstituteS), Brussels, has added two new members to its network of intemational research firms: Brian Sweeney & Associates in South Melbourne, Australia, and Environics in Toronto, Canada.

Spatial Insights, Inc., a Vienna, Va. geographic information services company, has donated a desktop mapping system and services to Food & Friends, a Washington, D.C., non-profit organization that provides three meals a day, at no cost, to people with HIV/AIDS. The company donated consulting services, Maplnfo software, and a color printer for Food & Friends staff to use in mapping and managing client meal deliveries. Business Location Research, Tucson, Ariz., also donated their proprietary StreetNetwork 5.0 product covering the Washington area. Food & Friends volunteers use maps prepared with MapInfo and StreetNetwork to complete their daily deliveries to clients.

Database America (DBA), Montvale, N.J., has signed a joint-marketing agreement with Decisionmark Corp. under which Decisionmark will act as a reseller of DBA’s All Business File and U.S. Consumer Information Database. The information will be formatted for use with Decisionmark’s desktop software package Proximity.

Carlson Marketing Consultants, serving the restaurant and hospitality industry, has moved to 23267 Cherry Mission Viejo, Calif.