Wow

Wow may refer to:

Games, toys, etc.

Music

Albums

Songs

Wow! (online service)

Wow! (styled WOW!) was an online service run by CompuServe.com in 1996 and early 1997. Started in March 1996, it was originally thought to be an improved version of CompuServe's software, but it was later announced that it would be a user-friendly stand-alone "family" online service and was widely advertised on TV as such. Wow! was the first internet service to be offered with a monthly "unlimited" rate ($17.95) and stood out because of its brightly colored, seemingly hand-drawn pages.

The first release of this program was quite buggy, with many random shutdowns of the service and loss of email messages. The service developed a small, but very loyal fan base. However, this was not enough and the service was shut down on January 31, 1997.

There is a strong group of "WOWIES" who have fought on for years after its demise, to stay connected through chat groups, and a webring. This group believes they were "sold out" by Compuserve because the service was being bought out by AOL, who began offering a $19.95 unlimited service as it was shutting down WOW.

Wow (Inna song)

"Wow" (stylised as "WOW") is a song by Romanian recording artist Inna, released as the fifth single from her second studio album, I Am the Club Rocker. The song was written and produced by Inna's producers and managers Play & Win (Sebastian Barac, Marcel Botezan, Radu Bolfea). Inna uploaded the song on her YouTube channel two weeks prior the album's release, along with an internet video to "Put Your Hands Up" and "Endless". It was released as a promotional single in Romania, exclusively in order to promote the brand new opening of iTunes Store Romania. It was unlocked on September 4, 2011 for a limited period towards September 6 and it was then removed and finally re-uploaded once with the album's release on September 19, 2011. A cover for the track was shot in late September on a Romanian beach at the Black Sea shore. On April 5, 2012 an official music video was released on Inna's YouTube Account.

Background

"WOW" was written, produced and arranged by Sebastian Barac, Marcel Botezan, Radu Bolfea, Inna's long-time producers who identify themselves as Play & Win. The track was recorded at the Play & Win Studios in Bucharest, Romania. It is a dance song, combining elements of Euro-NRG, Europop and dance-pop. Lyrically, the song invites listeners, especially Inna's fanbase of "Club Rockers", to join her in dance. Due to popularity among Inna's fanbase, the song was released as an official single later in 2012.

Precious coral

Precious coral or red coral is the common name given to Corallium rubrum and several related species of marine coral. The distinguishing characteristic of precious corals is their durable and intensely colored red or pink skeleton, which is used for making jewelry.

Habitat

Red corals grow on rocky seabottom with low sedimentation, typically in dark environments—either in the depths or in dark caverns or crevices. The original species, C. rubrum (formerly Gorgonia nobilis), is found mainly in the Mediterranean Sea. It grows at depths from 10 to 300 meters below sea level, although the shallower of these habitats have been largely depleted by harvesting. In the underwater caves of Alghero, Sardinia (the "Coral Riviera") it grows at depth from 4 to 35 meters. The same species is also found at Atlantic sites near the Strait of Gibraltar, at the Cape Verde Islands and off the coast of Southern Portugal. Other Corallium species are native to the western Pacific, notably around Japan (Corallium japonicum) and Taiwan; these occur at depths of 350 to 1500 meters below sea level in areas with strong currents.

Gala Coral Group

Gala Coral Group Ltd is a British betting shop, bingo and casino operator owned by private equity firms Candover Investments, Cinven and Permira. In October 2005 it merged with Coral Eurobet for £2.18 billion. The acquisition made it the UK's third largest bookmaker and largest bingo operator. It owns over 30 casinos. Coral will remain a brand and trading division of the new group.

The Group headquarters are in Nottingham (Gala Bingo and Casino), Stratford, London (Coral), and Woking (Gala Coral Remote Gaming). However, in 2011, a decision was made to move substantial parts of the business to Gibraltar, including almost all of the remote gaming division.

The group, through acquisitions and new developments have over 1800 licensed betting offices.

In July 2015, it was announced that Ladbrokes would merge with its slightly smaller rival Gala Coral, and that Ladbrokes' CEO, Jim Mullen would become the CEO of the new company, Ladbrokes Coral.

Group divisions

Gala Bingo

Gala Bingo operates 137 clubs throughout the UK, with approximately a 24% share of all clubs and nearly 40% of National Bingo Game ticket sales up until the operator's withdrawal from the National Game in Summer 2008.

Coral Content Distribution Network

The Coral Content Distribution Network, sometimes called Coral Cache or Coral, is a free peer-to-peer content distribution network designed and operated by Michael Freedman. Coral uses the bandwidth of a world-wide network of web proxies and nameservers to mirror web content, often to avoid the Slashdot Effect or to reduce the load on websites servers in general.

Operation

One of Coral's key goals is to avoid ever creating 'hot spots' of very high traffic, as these might dissuade volunteers from running the software out of a fear that spikes in server load may occur. It achieves this through an indexing abstraction called a distributed sloppy hash table (DSHT); DSHTs create self-organizing clusters of nodes which fetch information from each other to avoid communicating with more distant or heavily-loaded servers.

The sloppy hash table refers to the fact that Coral is made up of concentric rings of distributed hash tables (DHTs), each ring representing a wider and wider geographic range (or rather, ping range). The DHTs are composed of nodes all within some latency of each other (for example, a ring of nodes within 20 milliseconds of each other). It avoids hot spots (the 'sloppy' part) by only continuing to query progressively larger sized rings if they are not overburdened. In other words, if the two top-most rings are experiencing too much traffic, a node will just ping closer ones: when a node that is overloaded is reached, upward progression stops. This minimises the occurrence of hot spots, with the disadvantage that knowledge of the system as a whole is reduced.