Daily Archives: November 14, 2019

Sources speaking with Bloomberg and Buzzfeed report that Facebook hoped to acquire Musical.ly to break into the Chinese market. According to those sources, the talks in the second half of 2016 were serious but nothing ever came to fruition.

ByteDance eventually acquired Musical.ly in 2017 merging the app with Douyin to create TikTok.

Bloomberg reporting adds an additional angle to the reason why the deal never went through. Facebook walked away from the deal over concerns of the apps young userbase and Chinese ownership.

Thats a concern that landed TikTok in hot water over child safety concerns. Lawmakers in India briefly banned the app prompting a look at how TikTok moderates itself. The U.S. Treasury Department is currently investigating ByteDances acquisition of Musical.ly.

Leaked audio from a meeting this summer revealed that Zuckerberg plans to move fast and copy things when it comes to TikTok. That strategy worked once before when Instagram cloned the Stories feature from Snapchat so why wouldnt the plan work again?

In true copycat form, Instagram recently unveiled a new feature called Reels in Brazil. Reels is a TikTok clone with fewer video editing features, but Instagram is huge in Brazil. Last year, Facebook launched a separate TikTok clone app called Lasso but it hasnt caught on anywhere but Mexico.

Facebook has never been shy about cloning apps if they cant acquire them. Zuckerberg offered to buy Snapchat for $3 billion before Facebook and Instagram cloned its most popular features.

But when it comes to TikTok, it looks like Facebooks copy-to-complete game plan isnt quite panning out at least not yet. Sources speaking to BuzzFeed say TikTok has become a personal bugbear for Zuckerberg. One former high-ranking Facebook official said:

Facebook is so pissed that TikTok is the one thing they cant beat that theyve turned to geopolitical arguments and lawmakers in Washington to fight their fight.

Just recently, Zuckerberg excoriated TikTok for censorship and other political abuses. While our services like WhatsApp are used by protesters and activists everywhere due to strong encryption and privacy protections, on TikTok, the China-based app growing quickly around the world, mentions of these same protests are censored, even here in the US, Zuckerberg told an audience last month at Georgetown University.

Of course, Facebook itself has been accused of destroying democracy in realtime and radicalizing users en-masse. All of which probably makes TikTok a pleasant distraction for Zuckerberg.

Continued here:

Facebook Tried to Acquire Musical.ly For Six Months In 2016 - Digital Music News

Cannabis cultivators need a clean, reproducible growing process that can cater to high demand and create consistent product.

Enter large-scale, plant tissue culture propagation. Using practices adopted from orchid farming, plant cells are taken from a mother plant and grown using a specific regimen of nutrients, hormones, and light under sterile conditions on a nutrient culture medium.

The tissue culture process involves test tubes, sterile labs, and technicians wearing clean suits, so its a far cry from the country farm atmosphere. But if any crop is accustomed to artificial conditions its cannabis, and tissue culture holds a lot of promise for growers who want consistency and vigorous, disease-free plants.

However, its not a simple or easy process and definitely not cheap. Here well cover the process, its advantages, and disadvantages.

There are four basic steps to the tissue culture process.

Why would this method replace conventional methods of cloning cannabis? There are numerous advantages:

Theres less environmental waste with this process. According to Fred Green, a horticultural consultant in Princeton, Massachusetts, Eliminating the mother room reduces the need for a significant amount of water because you dont have to keep those plants alive. And in terms of energy, the number of watts per square foot required for tissue culture is just a fraction of what it is to keep a mother plant growing and healthy.

Additionally, the space required is far less than growing seeds, mother plants, or clones. In an average facility, 15-17% of space is used for mother plants and vegging clones. If you use tissue culture, almost all of that can be converted into flower production, said Green.

The tissue culture process is not quick or easy. Plants grown in a lab cant just immediately go into a greenhouse or field; its a delicate process.

It can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to set up a tissue culture operation. It requires highly skilled technicians, and in the current market, producers are largely untrained. Clean rooms are expensive to build and run, and they need special equipment to filter air to reduce the risk of contamination.

About that contaminationin the beginning of their lives, plantlets grown from tissue culture are much more vulnerable to disease than plants grown from seed or clone. Spores, bugs, and viruses can quickly wipe out a crop. According to Green, All tools have to be sterilized between each use. If you get disease spore on a tweezer and then you handle 20 plants, all 20 of those plants will certainly have disease.

While plantlets grow fast, putting a new crop into a clean stock program can take years. For example, it takes a minimum of six to nine months to get a new strain clean and stable enough to go into production. It can then take years to get it into large-scale production with thousands of plants.

Marketing for tissue culture often claims that growers will have consistent outcomes because plants start out disease- and pest-free. According to Jeremy Plumb, Director of Production Science at Pruf Cultivar in Oregon, thats only the beginning of the journey. You still need good growers and a stable growing environment to control temperature, lighting, humidity, nutrients, and more. Unless you can execute those variables, its very unlikely tissue culture is going to make any difference, said Plumb.

Today, very few companies in the US are jumping into tissue culture. This is partly because the legal market is still young and businesses are still figuring things out.

Because markets are limited at the state level, the consumer base is small, making this practice unviablebut California may be an exception. Green estimates that only a small amount of cannabis growers in the US use the process, but in Canada, where the legal market is the entire country, its much more. Canada is much further ahead than the US because you can ship it anywhere in the country.

So until the market expands, you may want to keep your aspirations for this high-tech process on hold.

Christine Giraud, a freelance writer in Boston, has been writing about cannabis for publications like The Boston Globe, Overture Global Magazine, Dig Boston, Civilized, Her(b) Life, and Foottraffik.

See original here:

Is tissue culture the future of growing cannabis? - Leafly