Imagine a group of young professionals enjoying a dinner party. It’s time for dessert, and everyone moves from the dinner table to the living room. A digestif is served alongside a handful of luxury chocolates that have a slightly sweet taste and a low-dose of THC that kicks in within 15 minutes, just as the coffee is ready from the kitchen.

Courtagen Life Sciences and Medicinal Genomics today announced a partnership with TheAnswerPage.com to provide continuing medical education (CME) credits to physicians and other healthcare professionals for the upcoming CannMed 2017 Personalized Cannabinoid Medicine Conference to be held at the Joseph B. Martin Conference Center at Harvard Medical School in Boston on April 9-11, 2017.

CannaKorp is a Stoneham-based startup that has earned the title of "Keurig for weed" because of the single-use, pod-based cannabis vaporizing system it has developed, and investors are lining up.

The company announced on Thursday that it has closed a $4.1 million Series A round led by private equity firm Singularity Capital Management, which focuses on the cannabis industry. This brings total funding to $5.7 million.

As more states approve cannabis for adult use (recreational marijuana), Duby—the Reddit-meets-Instagram social network that allows marijuana enthusiasts to post content anonymously—celebrates vigorous growth over the past two years. Duby is the go-to app for cannabis aficionados to unite and share their favorite images, videos and messages about the plant. Duby is a gamified app that leverages a proprietary algorithm to reach hundreds of thousands of consumers based on their location in real time, offering dispensaries a unique digital marketing play with quantifiable results.

The stock market reacted in a volatile manner to President-elect Donald Trump’s first press conference since the election.

Cannabis stocks were not immune from this volatility and we are closely monitoring biotech stocks levered to the cannabis industry as yesterday’s trading activity was not like anything we have seen before.

An Unprecedented Reaction

The market has never seen one person have such an impact on global market activity and want to briefly highlight how the President-elect’s comments impacted the markets, specifically that of the biotech sector.

A candy-colored pack of marijuana joints from Lola Lola, with its quirky characters splashed across the box, looks more like a prop from a Katy Perry music video than drug paraphernalia.

Its quirky, good-vibes feeling is exactly what creator Michael Garganese, Jr., is going for.

"We wanted to create something that you would feel comfortable leaving accidentally on your kitchen table. If Mom or Dad finds it, the conversation you get to have around that package is very different than if they find your black sack [of weed] under the bed," Garganese says.

"It's like, 'Honey, what is this?' 'Well, Mom, that's the way that cannabis is sold these days.'"

Keep track of what works for you!

Cannabis grows are getting more advanced thanks to these forward-thinking companies.

Many companies are expanding their reach into cultivation technology. The better the growing conditions, the better the cannabis. The major area of focus, however, is sustainability, making it a priority to help farmers save on electricity and water in order to reduce operating expenses and protect profit margin. Here are a few companies that are making a splash on the cultivation side of the industry.

The Vancouver-based biotech company has the upper hand in research and development in cannabis that is otherwise not permitted legally without a license.

With the federal government on the verge of legalising marijuana, high-value strategic assets in the cannabis sector are becoming valuable.

That is how Ottawa-based cannabis firm CannaRoyalty Corp. explained its interest in buying a 20% stake in Vancouver’s Anandia Laboratories.

The companies announced January 9 that they have signed a letter of intent for CannaRoyalty (CSE:CRZ) to acquire that 20% stake in Anandia for C$4 million (US$3,029,041).

A “targeted” cyber attack on a marijuana software company triggered an outage that hobbled point-of-sales and inventory systems for dispensaries scattered across the United States.

Denver-based MJ Freeway on Sunday morning tweeted it was experiencing an outage of its inventory system and was unable to process transactions. The cause of the “system interruption” was believed to be a cyber attack on its main databases and back-ups, officials told Marijuana Business Daily, which first reported on the outage: