February 17, 2010, Austin, TX— Solavicta, a company whose mission is to produce the lowest cost solar power generation equipment in the world, won the Texas round of the Moot Corp® Competition, the new venture competition hosted annually at The University of Texas at Austin's McCombs School of Business.

As winner of the Texas round, Solavicta lands a berth in this year's Global Moot Corp Competition and the Austin Technology Incubator Launch Package featuring the opportunity for a one year membership which includes strategic business consulting services and mentoring from a team of industry experts, office space, and access to discounted legal, accounting, and businesses services from top tier providers. The Global Moot Corp Competition will be held in Austin May 6 - 8.

“The best part about the competition is that somewhere in the middle of preparing for it, through all the effort, your simple idea or school project suddenly becomes real - a truly viable venture. This process gets you from "I'd like to start a company one day" to "I'm going to start a company now." said David McParland, Solavicta CEO.

The company is currently developing a solar technology that can be manufactured for less than $0.50 per watt and will allow the creation of fully-installed, grid-ready power systems for 25% less than the leading utility-scale solar power technologies. Rather than building and managing the entire system themselves, they intend to partner with large-scale renewable project developers so they can focus on being the technology provider. The Solavicta team members are David McParland and Franklin Fuchs who are both MBAs Class of 2010.

“For us, winning this competition is a further validation that our idea and plan has real merit, and it is absolutely a confidence booster. Also, the main reason I came back to get my MBA was that I wanted to someday start my own technology company. Before coming back to school, I remember reading about Texas Moot Corp winners and their ideas and remember thinking, I want to do that. So simply competing in it was rewarding as a personal accomplishment. Winning it means that Solavicta will now be launched sooner rather than later, and that this last semester is about to get very, very busy,” said McParland.

Solavicta competed with four other finalists in the Texas round of the 2010 competition that included:

• Ordoro is a simple, web-based order management software for small online retailers. Ordoro's goal is to improve the business productivity on back-end order fulfillment activities; thus allowing the business owner to focus on critical front-end revenue generation activities.

• MBAbenchmark enables MBAs to benchmark themselves against their peers, research hiring trends and find compelling job opportunities while giving recruiters an effective way to quickly filter, rank and connect with candidates according to custom criteria.

• Digital Proctor is revolutionizing online education with a novel internet identification technology. We have a signed letter of intent from our first customer; an act of Congress forcing our market to consider using us; a patent filed on our core techniques; and a demo proving our technology actually works.

• Mentionables is a high-quality, everyday undergarment line that caters to the underserved plus-size women’s market. Using a direct sales approach, we intend to provide a comfortable, positive shopping experience where the average-sized American woman can purchase well-fitting and sexy undergarments.

The finalists came from a field of 13 teams which competed in the Texas Moot Corp Semifinals on February 3. The top teams in three divisions proceeded to the Finals.

The Moot Corp Competition simulates the process of raising venture capital. It is a unique partnership that brings together MBAs and business leaders. The judges function as an investment group seeking to reach consensus on the business venture they would most likely fund. The judges base their decision on the quality of the idea, the strength of the management team and the clarity and persuasiveness of the written plan and oral presentation.

This year’s judges were a group of 11 former Texas Moot Corp competitors, many of them winners of the Texas competition. They included Phil Speros, MBA 2001, Halsa Pharmaceuticals; Barry Kahn, Ph.D. Economics 2007 and Jiten Dalvi, MBA 2007, Qcue; Harlan Beverly, MBA 2004, Bigfoot Networks; Daniel Nelson, MBA 2006, Phurnace Software; Doug Baum, Master of Science in Technology Commercialization 2007, MacuCLEAR; Matt Chasen, MBA 2004 and Jay Manickam, MBA 2004, uShip; Brian Romanko, MBA 2009 and Becky Parker, MBA 2009, FocalPop; and Divakar Jandhyala, MBA 2007, eVapt.

The Texas Moot Corp Competition is hosted by the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin. The Moot Corp Competition was the first competition of its kind focused on entrepreneurship and is the oldest operating inter-business Competitionschool new-venture competition in the world. The Global Moot Corp is recognized as the Super Bowl of world business-plan competition.