HN user
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):
http://www.ted.com/talks/bertrand_piccard_s_solar_powered_ad...
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).
Not sure if this still works, but here's an old thread from when it seemed to work: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=27113...
Blacksocks had come up earlier on HN, with some interesting comments. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=534330
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.
Have you seen getabstract.com? They are pretty successful from what I've heard, but their model is different from yours.