asQme was a video Q&A platform that allowed fans to interview their favorite celebrities. Fans posted questions on our site, voted for the best ones and celebrities answered the most popular ones via our iOS and Android app. Content on the platform generated millions of views and our videos were featured on leading music media sites such as NME, Billboard and Rolling Stone.

I persuaded numerous topline artists to appear on the platform, including; Steve Aoki, Deadmau5, Fatboy Slim, Anthrax, NOFX, Jose Feliciano, Ride, Armin van Buuren, Opeth, members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Oasis. I was able to negotiate a free of charge deal for all artists by underlining the promotion opportunity that the platform represented.

I managed the product from conception through to reality. This meant overseeing and working closely with software developers, a variety of technologies, content editors, social media managers and artist management to deliver an iOS and Android based video Q&A app, which artists could use to generate video content perfect for distributing online. My broad skillset was extremely useful when interfacing with and understanding the various facets of the business and bringing the product together.

It was my responsibility to raise venture capital to fund the product's development. This meant pitching investors and raising capital in Japan. As part of this process it was critical to have an understanding of what a good venture capital deal looked like and how to establish terms which gave the us the highest chance of success. This meant learing how to say "no" when investors requested things like redemption rights and monthly reporting requirements when our company was still at an early stage of business.

asQme

Talent & Content Acquisition

Product Ownership & Management

Fundraising

Alive was a crowdfunding platform for live music that helped international musicians tour Japan. Japan is a very risk averse market and in the early 2010's promoters had very few mechanisms to assess artist popularity; the result was a lack of touring opportunities for international artists. I founded Alive to solve this problem. The concept was simple; create a crowdfunding project for a band to tour Japan and set a public ticket sales target that had to be reached by a given deadline in order for the tour to go ahead. The business captured the Japanese imagination leading to features with national broadcaster NHK, GQ Japan, Nikkei Shimbun, The Japan Times, J-Wave, InterFM, Nylon and many others. During 7 years of business, we organised hundreds of concerts for thousands of fans and all manner of artists such as; Bay City Rollers, The Animals, Gang of Four, Stiff Little Fingers. Sales grew to an excess of 7 figures. Unfortunately, the occurrence of the coronavirus pandemic forced business activity to be curtailed.

I produced the tours and concerts working closely with artist management, crew and venue staff to plan and deliver first class live music events. As part of this I became deeply familiar with live music production techniques, translating technical documents, stage management, venue security, logistics, event staffing and the Japanese work visa system.

I oversaw the promotion and marketing for the tours, working with our Japanese team to create content for 3rd party ticketing companies, radio stations, print and social media. I also oversaw the implementation of a segmentation strategy to solicit sales via email from our existing customer base.

As the founder of a small business, I directly managed the company, planned our finances and was responsible for recruiting, hiring and firing. The result was a profitable 7-figure revenue business, serving thousands of customers and prospering in the notoriously difficult Japanese music market.

Alive

Tour & Concert Production

Japanese Promotion & Marketing

Management

Tokyo Indie was a popular club night that I founded in Tokyo in 2009. The bi-monthly night I organised attracted large crowds and hosted major artists like My Bloody Valentine, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, CSS, Metronomy, Scissor Sisters, members of The Stone Roses, The Mystery Jets and many more. To support the event I ran a dual language media site that featured the latest goings on in the Tokyo music, art and culture scenes. I also developed the website for the blog, recently performing a full-stack rebuild using Gatsby, React and Sanity CMS.

Whilst the site was originally built with Wordpress, I recently decided to rebuild it from scratch using the React framework; Gatsby, as part of a headless CMS setup with Sanity CMS. This was a full stack development job as well as an export, transfer, load (ETL) exercise. For the ETL I wrote a custom python script for porting the old site content whilst following a test driven development methodology using python's unittest feature.

I was directly involved in the promotion of our media site and our events. On the media side, in 2009 dual language sites were few and far between and being dual language was a unique selling point that I used to draw in international talent. From there we had a base of contact to persuade artists to appear at our physical events. Once the artists agreed to appear we utilised a well oiled online marketing strategy which involved social media, mailing lists, guestlists and our own website to pull in large crowds event after event.

The production and planning of each event itself fell to me and my team. This meant hiring and staffing the venue, artist logistics, handling technical and hospitality requirements and sorting all finance for the events.

Tokyo Indie

Web Development

Sales & Marketing

Event Organisation

Yuno Analytics was a social media analytics company giving insights into the national marketing campaigns run by major brands in Japan. I performed data analysis of the public perception of marketing campaigns by using sentiment and volume analysis techniques, which I wrote using python and skills that I picked up from my earlier neuroscience research.

I performed data analysis on Japanese social media data. In particular, I focused on mapping a timeline of individual events as part of a wider marketing campaign to specific responses generated on social media, performing both volume and sentiment analysis using NLP to assess which parts of a marketing campaign were delivering the best ROI.

I wrote an internal python application to pull social media data in from external APIs and web scrapers and then performed various analyses on the data.

I ran an outbound sales and marketing campaign targeting large multinational businesses such as Nestle, JWT, Universal Music and many more to win new business.

Yuno Analytics

Data Analysis & Machine Learning

Software Development

As a neuroscience researcher in the Gardner Research Unit at RIKEN BSI I carried out research projects relating to the classification accuracy of large veins in the human primary visual cortex using fMRI and the representation of bias in the human visual system.

As part of my research I regularly used machine learning techniques like Fisher's linear discriminant to discern what a human subject was seeing from their brain activity during a behavioural task. This established a solid understanding of machine learning principles such as data labelling, model training and best practices to avoid overfitting experimental data.

I worked with a custom data pipeline and software tools developed by our lab head in matlab. This meant working in matlab to perform matrix calculations and apply machine learning and statistical analysis techniques. It also meant regularly debugging the pipeline for issues which came about due to changes in the methods used to acquire experimental data.

My work gave me first hand experience of performing fMRI experiments with visual stimuli and human subjects, as well as measuring human behaviour using visual psychophysics. My early focus was on how large draining veins affect fMRI data recorded from the visual cortex. During my research I made great use of signal detection theory, which despite being pioneered for radar, has long been used to study cortical activity in the visual system. My later research was particularly focused on how bias, which is central to signal detection theory, might be represented in the human visual system.

RIKEN Brain Science Institute

Machine Learning & Data Analysis

Programming

Scientific Research

In April 2021, Les Mckeown the much loved lead singer of 70s pop idols, The Bay City Rollers, suddenly passed away. I had worked with Leslie for many years, taking him on numerous highly successful tours of Japan. I decided to self fund, curate and produce an A4 sized, full colour, hardback, coffee-table style photobook in his memory. To produce book I used some of the last professionally taken photographs of Les, as well a live photography which were taken on his last full tour with my company, Alive.

I crowdfunded the book and devised a online-offline marketing campaign to raise the funds to cover publishing costs. I ran a PR campaign to push the crowdfunder and secured features in major newspapers such as The Scotsman, The Edinburgh Evening News and the Daily Record.

Producing the book was an exercise in curation given that the photos we had were intended to be used for promotional purposes rather than to tell the story of Leslie's life. As such I had to study the photos and profile each one, creating a mood board to ultimately organise the photos in a manner that let them tell their own story, before writing accompanying text.

The project was mine from start to finish, from conception through to execution and delivery of a final luxury product. I oversaw the printing, graphic design work, shipping and sales process for the entire first edition, which was warmly received by Leslie's fans.

Les McKeown’s Bay City Rollers: The Last Tour

Marketing and Promotion

Curation

Project Management

<p>I first moved to Japan in September 2008 on the <a href="https://dajf.org.uk/scholarships/daiwa-scholarship/scholars/daiwa-scholars-2008">Daiwa Scholarship</a>; a unique 19-month programme of language study, work placement and homestay in Japan. My work placement led to a job offer at <a href="https://bsi.riken.jp/en/">RIKEN Brain Science Institute</a> founding <a href="https://sammokhtary.com/#work">several businesses</a> and ultimately about 12 years on and off in the land of the rising sun.</p>


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