The ‘Start-Up Alley Challenge' is designed to help start-up companies gain visibility and access to industry players that could lead to solid business opportunities.

Detroit, Mich., October 28, 2013 – GreenLancer.com, a web-based solar energy engineering company, won First Place in Start-Up Alley at the 2013 Solar Power International (SPI). SPI is the largest global gathering of leaders in the solar industry and the ‘Start-Up Alley Challenge' is designed to help start-up companies gain visibility and access to industry players that could lead to solid business opportunities in the rapidly expanding solar industry.

"At so many major events, finding the start-up companies with the innovative ideas is like looking for a needle in the proverbial haystack. Start-Up Alley puts all the needles in one place," said Mike Dersohwitz, president of ModSolar, and the driving force behind the program. The 19 semi-finalists in the challenge received a free booth at SPI and had the opportunity to gain visibility with the SPI audience for their early-stage business.

"This award showed that our GreenLancer.com business model is appreciated by industry insiders for its innovative and cost effective approach to solar installations," said Michael Sharber, chief executive officer at GreenLancer. Com. "More importantly, the award was a great catalyst for our business development efforts as we were able to meet with a variety of potential major customers at the show – all of whom seemed genuinely interested in what we had to offer."

SPI assembled a distinguished panel of industry leaders and visionaries to serve as judges for the first Start-Up Alley Challenge. GreenLancer.com was the unanimous first place winner, lauded by the judges for taking aim at a significant reduction in ‘soft costs', using an e-commerce platform that is able to provide design and engineering services to the online world of cloud computing. GreenLancer advantages include easy to use engineering support on the fly, anywhere in the world, and fast accurate delivery of engineering documents. According to Jigar Shah, one of the judges, "GreenLancer stood out among the competition by demonstrating a visionary and innovative business model".