Hey mate, wanna buy some pot… stocks? Yes, Australian medical cannabis companies listed on the Australian Stock Exchange are hot items right now. But as investors rush to get in on the ground floor of a nascent market, things aren’t always working out as planned.

Consider MMJ Phytotech. Shareholders who bought into the company last year might now be scratching their heads. Since February 2016, the company’s share price fallen by roughly 40 percent.

Things had looked promising for the young Australian pharmaceutical firm. It had struck a reverse takeover deal that allowed it to enter the Canadian medical market, and it was in the process of setting up a “farm-to-pharma” supply chain that tied together production, research, and manufacturing.

Transdermal cannabis patches are a unique method of cannabis consumption. You needn’t inhale nor ingest to experience its effects. In fact, you don’t even need to touch a cannabis flower at all. All the work is done by a simple patch adhered to a veinous area of the body, thus allowing the cannabinoids to go to work entering the bloodstream for an effective and long-lasting response.

Cannabis is currently the world’s most explosive industry, but the boom will not be limited to medicine and hemp. Advances made in technology for growing, tracking and testing cannabis will extend to agriculture as a whole.

Agtech has been a buzzword in Silicon Valley the past few years, with a record $2.7 billion invested in the space in 2015. But so far returns haven’t met expectations. Part of it is tight margins, which make it tough for farmers to invest in R&D and innovation, even if they can demonstrate a positive ROI. But even more so, many farmers are extremely risk-averse, and they don’t want to pilot technologies, but would readily adopt proven systems.

These entrepreneurial twentysomethings are riding a wave of marijuana legalization to online celebrity. Call them Cheech and Chong for the digital age.

osh Young smokes weed before he eats breakfast. He gets high before lunch, too, again before dinner, and usually one or two more times on top of that. Most days, on at least a few of those occasions, he’s filming it for his YouTube channel, StrainCentral, which has more than 373,000 subscribers. Millions watch him every month.

This is how Young pays his bills. And if that’s a hard idea to wrap your head around, Young said it’s even harder to answer the question of how he makes a living.

With a long track record of research in the medicinal properties of indigenous herbal plants, the University of Technology (UTech) has now strengthened its ability to delve deeper into the research of medical cannabis.

Last week, the university signed a memorandum of agreement with Timeless Herbal Care - an international, nutraceutical and pharmaceutical company, for the development of research in medical marijuana.

Under the agreement, UTech will provide technical training of stakeholders through expertise in its School of Pharmacy, College of Health Sciences, as well as research and testing of cannabis strains for product formulation.

The “Green Rush” may have already started, but it’s not too late to grab a seat on the emerald entrepreneurial wagon.

Such were the sentiments expressed by some guest speakers at Hacker Lab’s startup expo Thursday night, focusing on tech and the marijuana industry. Recent numbers from the University of Pacific indicate the region could benefit significantly from the cannabis industry.

Marijuana, the wonder plant as some call it is going through a liberation phase in the United States. In 37 out of 50 states have relaxed the laws regarding the sale and use of marijuana and its derivatives in the past few years. Most of these states approve of the medical use of marijuana while a handful also makes an exception for recreational use. But these relaxations come with riders to make it difficult for businesses dealing with cannabis.

The program that is integrated into the company’s dosing methods is the “the first of its kind for the edibles industry,” according to Americanna’s co-founder, Frank Falconer.

The distillation process takes food grade decarboxylated cannabis oil and removes impurities – ingredients like lipids and decomposing terpenes, Falconer explained.

Tripling the size of the distillation equipment

Falconer said the traditional methods of extracting edibles concentrate by using CO2 or hydrocarbon do not change, because the distillation process happens only after the cannabis oil is decarboxylated and activated for edible consumption.

“CO2 oil and hydrocarbon oil can both be distilled,” he said.

It’s a well-established trope in the mainstream financial press and even in much of the modern consciousness that Bitcoin is merely the Cayman Islands of currencies. Criminals use it to hide their money (same as they do cash, but with more efficiency) from the government. While Bitcoin is nearly impossible to actually eradicate itself, the fear of government intervention to prevent merchants from using the currency has long pervaded conversations about Bitcoin.

In April 2016, Mike Williams took the app he and his team built and sold it on eBay. Less than a year after the acquisition, Thinkbox is back with a new app, and this time, it’s all about weed.

When the legalization of recreational cannabis, Prop 64, passed back in November, it didn’t take long for enterprising individuals to start thinking about new business opportunities. 

“Right now, it is like a free for all,” said Williams. “There are a lot of domain experts that are trying to leverage technology fast to gain a foothold in the space, but on the other side there are a lot of people that are afraid to get into the space.”