Bertrand Piccard, who is leading this project, comes from a family of explorers (e.g. he was also the first to travel non-stop around the world in a hot-air balloon). He also gave a pretty interesting TED talk (starting with ballooning as a metaphor for life, then moving on the solar airplane project):
A couple years ago, I saw it was possible to download and run Firefox in a corporate environment without admin rights (downloading and unzipping the zip archive, then just starting the exe without any installation).
I vaguely remember hearing a speech by the founder in Switzerland around 2002. If I remember right, he had a single employee and was making ~1M CHF annual revenue at the time. He was so confident of his product that he listed his competitors on his own website - and he would mark each one that went out of business.
http://www.ted.com/talks/bertrand_piccard_s_solar_powered_ad...