Well, they've got it. The pair--who turned their Stanford University class project into a full-time job--this week in the student category at the Other student winners were Jeremy Olson for the app and Stephen Varga for the app.

"I'm still kind of getting over it. It was a class project, and from that we just wanted to sell a few hundred apps," said Gupta, 24, who has partnered with Kothari to form . Under that umbrella, they plan to refine their news-reading app and distribute it to other platforms.

"Apple obviously really has a good design sense, and we take a lot of inspiration from Apple products," Gupta said. "We have confirmation from Apple that maybe our intuition is correct."

The other ADA winners were similarly gratified to receive such recognition so early in their careers. For Olson, whose Grades 2 app helps college students calculate their grades and prioritize their study efforts, the award comes before he even completes his education--the 20-year-old is about to start his senior year at UNC-Charlotte.

Grades 2, he said, was born of a desire to get that education right. After getting a bad grade on a statistics test, he started calculating what grades he would need on future tests.