Work: Success Stories

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When you manage the IT needs of Fortune 500 companies, mobility, flexibility, and reliability are key. That’s why the IT pros at World Wide Technology rely on iPhone to communicate, coordinate, and maintain network infrastructures in the field.

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Dentist Bia Kunze had a simple idea: If you can’t make it to the dentist, the dentist will come to you. Kunze is a mobile dentist in Brazil, treating house or hospital-bound patients in and around the city of Curitiba. To manage her practice on the go, she uses Bento for iPhone.

“I have a Bento database on my phone where I keep all of my patients’ records, including appointments, medical history, and dental diagrams,” she says. “It’s the easiest, most flexible solution for keeping records on the go. With Bento on the iPhone, I have everything I need to run my practice in my pocket.”

Bento rocks. Just ask Heather St. Marie, the lead singer of the Los Angeles-based rock band Hydrovibe. She uses Bento to keep track of concert venues, band merchandise, and more. The database program has become the band’s electronic administrative assistant, handling all the day-to-day data that keeps the band going. “ This is pretty much a personal assistant for me,” says St. Marie. “It’s taking a lot of effort out of the admin side of things. It gives me more time to be the singer, be the merchandise person and to just be a band member.”

Graduating from OIART is only the beginning. Thankfully, Robert Breen is there to get things started. His official title is “Career Development and Industry Relations,” but to OIART grads, he’s much more. He’s a coach, a personal agent, and a headhunter that’ll help track down good gigs in the industry. “I get to know all of the students on a personal level, get to see them in sessions, do fake job interviews with them, make them cold call me as if I were a potential employer, help them with resumes,” he says. “I teach them how to find work and network. Then I go hunting for job postings and employment opportunities. Because I know them personally, I know what they’re looking for and where they’ll fit in.”

How do you market to a vampire? That’s the challenge interactive agency Digital Kitchen faced as they created a series of fang-in-cheek ads to promote HBO’s smash show True Blood. Using applications such as Final Cut Studio and Adobe Creative Suite, the all-Mac shop produced billboards and print ads for brands like MINI and Gillette, and a collection of darkly humorous online viral videos revealing that, after all, vampires are people too.

Erykah Badu is awash in creative energy. She conjures the stuff from thin air, whipping up hooks and melodies with little more than a basic backing track. Think soulful freestyle riffs and lyrics punctuated by the boom and clack of a jazzy drum kit. Yet even a steady stream of creativity like Badu’s can be diverted—for days, weeks, months, or years. In fact, five years passed without a new Badu album. Some said she had writer’s block. Some said she had lost her groove. Turns out the vibe was alive the whole time—it simply needed a new channel to flow into.

Greg Laswell’s soulful acoustic sound is laced with bright guitar riffs and stirring, natural vocals. It’s easy to picture Laswell perched on a worn chair with an old Martin guitar, scrawling verses, chord progressions, and solos onto a yellow legal pad. But you’re more likely to find Laswell hunched over his MacBook, strumming and singing into GarageBand, which the musician uses to scribble aural ideas, flesh out full songs, and even record demos for record label execs.

Few DJs can electrify a crowd like Paul van Dyk. That connection was originally analog—all of his grooves were etched into a few tons of vinyl. But for about three years now van Dyk has been strictly digital. Today he conjures his sets on a pair of MacBook Pros using Logic Studio and Ableton Live. In fact, it probably isn’t accurate to call him a “DJ” anymore. Van Dyk weaves his own music real-time, like any live musician. He uses his dance-floor sixth sense and his skills as a renowned producer to create new tracks during every performance.