Canditto cops Babson prize for innovation

Babson College, the Wellesley school that has a focus on training future entrepreneurs, said today that Canditto won the first-place $30,000 prize in its innovation competition.

Canditto is a Cambridge firm that rents out kiosks for events such as weddings and bar or bat mitzvahs. On its website, the firm says, "Rent a Canditto kiosk for your special event and you'll get copies of all your guests' digital pictures, delivered on a memory stick or CD before the night is over."

Canditto also said this on its website: "Canditto works best wherever there are lots of smiles and digital cameras. After guests have taken a full evening's worth of pictures on their own digital cameras, the Canditto Kiosk is the simplest way to collect those photos onto a single photo CD album. Guests need only insert their camera's memory card for a few moments while its patented technology copies only the photos taken in the last eight hours."

Canditto is now searching for angel investors, chief executive Rush Hambleton said during a telephone conversation.

Babson said in a press release that yesterday's competition was part of the day-long Babson Forum on Entrepreneurship & Innovation that was organized by MBA students at the F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College.
(By Chris Reidy, Globe staff)