This festival season, AV equipment rental companies will have increased peace of mind over the location and safety of their equipment thanks to the new TAZAAR GeoTag Retrofit. The product family has been created in collaboration with AV equipment providers to meet their specific needs, with the first release dedicated to the popular Pioneer CDJ-3000 professional DJ multiplayer.
“This project started with a request from Blue River Audio, who wanted to have a better understanding of where their CDJ-3000s were,” recalls Lisa Stafford, CEO of TAZAAR. “They shared one of their rental units with us so we could find a way to retrofit GeoTag into this vital piece of DJ gear.”
The result is a bespoke design of TAZAAR’s ground-breaking GeoTag that integrates perfectly within a CDJ-3000 player. Offering independent GPS, GeoTag Retrofit is a self-contained device with its own network connection, so there is no dependency on nearby phones or third-party infrastructure. Its location history feature provides a full route log from warehouse to venue and back, so users know where their equipment has been, not just where it was last seen.
“We loved the geofencing capabilities that GeoTag Retrofit has given us,” notes Tim James from Blue River Audio. “We know exactly where the equipment is supposed to be on every site we work, and using GeoTag we can set up alerts if our gear moves outside the area it is supposed to be in. It has given us a complete understanding of where our equipment is.”
The solution meets one of the major challenges that rental companies regularly face with CDJ-3000s. The player is desirable and highly portable, making it attractive to thieves. However, while not being cheap to replace, the price point means that many rental companies won’t want to go through an increase in their insurance premiums after making a claim for it as a stolen device. GeoTag Retrofit provides the confidence that equipment will be protected and can be recovered if it goes missing.
While Blue River Audio was the first rental partner to request this first GeoTag Retrofit, it is not the only company to have benefitted from the new product. The CDJ-3000 is essentially an industry standard piece of equipment for companies that supply DJ gear and many rental houses have invested in protecting their fleet of players. One such example is BigFishSRL, which is seeing genuine benefits from its investment.
“GeoTag Retrofit has given us real peace of mind that the equipment we hire out is safe,” explains Steve Hubbard from BigFish. “The CDJ-3000 is very portable and something we have seen actively getting attention on site. GeoTag Retrofit has given us confidence that the gear is protected, and if anything ends up somewhere it shouldn’t, we’ll always be able to find it.”
The popularity of the first member of the GeoTag Retrofit family has proven the desire from the rental community to have this kind of technology built into their equipment. TAZAAR has seen this demand and listened to requests for further GeoTag Retrofit designs. The next version is planned to be for a mixing console and will be announced later in the year.
“We are seeing requests from the industry to help businesses protect all sorts of gear,” concludes Stafford. “We are always happy to work with rental companies to find a solution that will support them as we expand our GeoTag Retrofit family. We’re also actively working directly with manufacturers to help them to integrate GeoTag technology in their products from the outset. Every new request helps to ensure businesses can protect their investments and get the most out of the equipment they own.”
