There are millions of cogs in the Indian economy's wheels.

They grind ever so slowly, sickly, barely making it from one month to the next.

Getting them into the digital age is like forcing them to time travel.

But Udaan believed it was possible.

The founders had helped to build India's first ecommerce company, Flipkart.

And they knew that there was gold beneath all the heat and grime of India's small B2B businesses.

They didn't promise these businesses the earth.

What they did tell them was the mobile app would make it easy for them to find products, place orders, track inventory and sales.

Through the last 3-4 years, the small businesses began to rely on the app instead of travelling to distant cities like they used to earlier.

Connecting traders, wholesalers, retailers and manufacturers, Udaan saw how the cogs connected and what was moving.

The estimated credit demand of these businesses, according to a survey by the Bank of America adds up to $300-$350 billion.

And Udaan is uniquely equipped to identify the consistent and fast growing players in the network.

The early success of Udaan came from establishing the payment infrastructure for these businesses.

The next leap? Helping them grow.

Plastic gets all the attention

Only 10% of all plastics produced can be recycled. So, we're drowning in the stuff.

But there's more to managing the environment than cutting down on plastic.

The fashion industry is supposed to be the second largest polluter after oil.

Other studies have pronounced chemicals as the culprit.

Agriculture is a major drain on the freshwater resources of the world

Manufacturing metals is also a major contributor to emissions.

All of this adds up.

But we don't have an accurate picture of the overall situation.

There are several overlaps and the way in which manufacturing, trade and logistics interact.

That data is not consolidated. Bringing them all together is not feasible because each country generates its own data sets.

There isn't a single way in which all of this can be seen through one lens.

Bringing about change requires fundamental shifts in every aspect of how business is done.

Activists highlight what they are most concerned about.

Technologists and researchers are the ones who have to come up with solutions.

Implementation is another ball game altogether

But some sectors get far more money and attention than others.

Policy, politics, profits and power are involved 

And that's a heady cocktail

The dictionary became the stock exchange

It was precisely defined.

The headline was limited to 25 characters, followed by 35 characters for the second and third lines and then the URL.

That's how the original AdWords were and the dominant format continues with tweaks from time to time.

All those slaving away on writing the ads must have thought the limits were plucked out of a hat. Or torture tests.

There are times when words had to be fitted into the defined limits using all kinds of tricks from the thesaurus or swapping one word for another.

It's data-driven creative, not the one that ad agencies in the 80s and 90s would have had anything to do with.

A little like writing classified ads all year

The billion dollar market is an assembly line of words and phrases churning out profits far beyond what traditional agencies ever could

But it had it's roots in newspapers.

Each newspaper column is roughly a couple of inches wide

There's a clear reason. It's easy for eyes to scan and read columns.

The longer the line, the harder it is to read

AdWords was built on sound principles of a century of newspaper design.

And making a stock exchange from the dictionary.

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