Tuesday, April 23, 2024

Emeen Zarookian performs last year with his band, Spirit Kid. (Photo: Maclaine Diemer)

Spirit Kid, the Cambridge band led by Harmonix Beatles genius Emeen Zarookian, is headed to Austin, Texas, for three sets during the South by Southwest music, film and technology festival.

“That’s right, we’re doing it, we’re really doing it,” Zarookian said Monday, clueing fans into his showtimes in Austin: 6 p.m. Thursday at Tom’s Tabooley, 2928 Guadalupe St., as part of the fourth annual International Psychout; 7:30 p.m. Friday at the Wardenclyffe Art Gallery, 1101 Springdale Road; and 2 p.m. Saturday at Banger’s Sausage House & Beer Garden, 79 Rainey St.

(In other, totally random Spirit Kid news, a tweet from Zarookian appears in this trailer for the movie “Project X” — an honor that surprised Zarookian as much as anyone.)

Here’s the latest official video for Spirit Kid, for its “Wrong Kind of Money.”

Not many Cambridge bands make it down to the annual festival, although Monique Ortiz, the alt-blues singer, actually moved there in 2009 after years in local bands such as Bourbon Princess and A.K.A.C.O.D. Ortiz has unofficial festival shows at 10 p.m. Tuesday at Kenny Dorham’s Backyard, 1106 East 11th St., and at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Key Bar, 617 West 6th St.

But local tech startups get to take part too, and those are a bit more plentiful. The Boston Business Journal reported Monday on seven “Boston” startups headed down, and six are from Cambridge: Modo Labs, the provider of all sorts of open-source mobile apps for universities; BodiMojo, which aims to improve teen health and body image; the Funf Project, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab effort that uses open-source code to take data from Android phones and make it available to be analyzed and exploited in seemingly countless ways; Ginger.io, Media Lab spinoff intended to measure health and wellness from mobile phone use; Sourcemap, a free system for tracking business supply chains “to measure, improve and share the social and environmental impact”; and Viztu Technologies, which does 3-D scanning and imaging and lets the images be viewed, shared, downloaded or even printed via the Web.