You can already read a news article and order a cab from a bot, so it was only a matter of time until you could place a weed order through one.

Over the past couple of months, Canna Freedom—a dispensary located in Monterey, Calif.,—has been experimenting with a chat bot within Flok, a mobile app that works with 50,000 businesses to power their loyalty programs to improve customer service and understand what types of products customers are interested in.

Genius Extraction Technologies and its massive installation of distilling tubes towered over the Cannabis World Congress expo floor. In the video above, co-founder Robert Gaither walks us through how the cannabis oil extraction process works, from its negative pressure and temperature system to cooling and filtration, evaporation, and distillation on an enterprise manufacturing scale.

Emerald Scientific has announced the results for its 2016 Emerald Test, and cannabis testing labs earned impressive scores. Nearly 50 labs entered the company’s semi-annual Inter-lab Comparison and Proficiency Test, which measures a lab’s ability to determine amounts of cannabinoids and residual solvents in an unknown sample.

“This is a very positive sign for the industry,” commented Wes Burk, Vice President of Emerald Scientific. “Labs across the country performed better than expected and in line with testing parameters used by non-cannabis industries.”

Leafedin.Org is the only cannabis app on the market that focuses specifically on person to person networking in the marijuana industry, but also works for any other entities. LeafedIn stated it has in the range of ten thousand users using it to meet their cannabis product and marijuana employment needs anonymously.

A key metric of this success is the popularity of the Leafedin.org service in the Washington DC area, which is one of the best known examples of areas that lack the kind of technology and networking framework that LeafedIn.org provide, where it has already amassed almost a thousand daily users.

A new P.E.I.-based business is putting the squeeze on cannabis — literally.

Charlottetown's Advanced Extraction Systems Inc. has just sealed a deal with Canopy Growth, a medical marijuana company based out of Smiths Falls, Ont., to provide the equipment to extract cannabis oil directly from marijuana plants.

In a release, Canopy Growth chairman Bruce Linton said the deal will help meet a growing demand.

"Our extracted oil products have been very popular since being launched to our medical customers earlier this year," he said.

"Looking forward to a broader legal marijuana market, we know we'll need greater capacity and AESI's industrial-scale technology will help us meet the growing demand we're forecasting."

Nestled between majestic Redwoods and flanked by epic views, a dream has manifested and acts a beacon for the future of cannabis cultivation in California. Integrating leading technology with old school farming knowhow, Humboldt Integrated Cannabis has completed its first project. The fruition of a dream, the facility is the cutting edge of Humboldt’s nascent industry.

Walking into a cannabis show in New York City is a perfect metaphor for how mainstream America approaches weed culture right now. The Cannabis World Congress expo floor at the Javits Center was overloaded with booths sporting flea market-style displays of edibles, extracts, and oils, plenty of shiny new tech, and piles of giveaway swag in different shades of green. There were also businesses hocking every kind of service imaginable, trying to capitalize on our buzziest new billion dollar industry. Cannabis consultants, lawyers, security companies, weed universities — pick a profession and tint it leaf-green.

Mike Dixon wants to send plants to Mars. Growing crops in space is the best way to provide proper nutrition to the crew on a long-duration mission, this University of Guelph researcher believes—but because there’s no manned mission to Mars scheduled at the moment, it’s hard to get funding for this type of research.

In the meantime, he and a growing number of other botanists are studying a plant where there’s plenty of funding right now, in Canada anyway: cannabis.

License granted to Alaska testing company AK Green Labs LLC.

Steep Hill, the global industry leader in cannabis testing and analytics, today announced it has licensed its cannabis testing technologies to a highly-respected team of scientists who have plans to open Steep Hill Alaska as a full service cannabis quality assurance laboratory in Anchorage, Alaska, bringing advanced scientific tools and methodology to the state. 

It's a big week for the legal cannabis industry. Hundreds of marijuana business, manufacturing, media, technology, and product companies descended upon the Javits Center in New York City this week for Cannabis World Congress. At the same time, Microsoft is entering the space, partnering with seed-to-sale software company Kind Financial on compliance solutions for state and local governments.