In February, more than a third of all online-display ads in the U.S. appeared on Facebook, according to comScore Inc. That’s more than three times as many as its closest rival, Yahoo Inc., had.

But Facebook doesn’t come close to capturing a third of the online-ad budgets of major marketers, partly because its ad rates are relatively low, and also because of its hard-to-navigate in-house systems for buying ads.

Enter a new set of specialized Facebook agencies that seek to offer an easier way to buy ads on the social-networking site. The emergence of more than a dozen firms, including Blinq Media LLC, Kenshoo Ltd. and Web-trends Inc., follows a move by Facebook in 2009 to start opening direct access to its internal ad systems to select outsiders.

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My apartment has more than a dozen devices that feed off the network: two laptops, a printer, an e-reader, wireless speakers, two smartphones, an iPad and more. Yet getting gadgets to connect to my two-year-old wireless router is a dark art. I can surf the Web on the street in front of my house, yet can’t get a signal sitting in bed. In desperation, I even tried dangling a router—the equipment that takes your Internet connection and shares it with the devices in your home—from the ceiling in an effort to distance it from interfering walls.

Surely, covering a whole apartment is a problem that the decade-old Wi-Fi industry can solve. So I tested four top-of-the-line home wireless routers, each of which features the latest generation dual-band “wireless N” technology designed to increase performance.

The result was disappointing. None of the routers could deliver a 100% consistent wireless experience that could take advantage of the latest technology, like Apple’s AirPlay media-streaming service.

One came close, thanks to a controversial signal-boosting feature that could potentially interrupt my neighbors’ networks: the Netgear WNDR3700, which retails for $169.99. Another, the $179.99 Cisco Linksys E3000, was runner-up in some tests, but still sometimes dropped out when streaming music.

My tests weren’t scientific studies of signal strength and speed. Every home is a different combination of size, building materials and potential competition for precious wireless bandwidth, such as other Wi-Fi networks and cordless phones. Even pets can obstruct signals. Because of that, router manufacturers won’t even offer estimates on the range their devices can serve.

I conducted real-world torture tests designed to see how the routers might perform in challenging scenarios at completing tasks like streaming media to iPhones and moving large files between computers. I didn’t test devices known as repeaters, which extend the range of an existing network, because I wanted to see how far I could push the routers on their own.

My 100-year-old apartment building features materials that act like kryptonite to Wi-Fi signals, such as metal mesh in plaster. Worse, my urban San Francisco building is surrounded by apartments with their own Wi-Fi networks—25, at last count.

For balance, I also tested the same four routers on my friend Mark’s suburban house, which competes with fewer neighboring Wi-Fi networks, but is larger. In our suburban tests, the routers performed in largely the way they did in the urban environment, though in that setting both the Netgear and Cisco performed admirably. A third model, the $109.99 Belkin Play N600HD, performed adequately.

All the routers I tested, which included the $179 Apple Airport Extreme, feature a technology called simultaneous dual band. This means they really run two networks. Devices that need to receive a lot of data, like video, can use the digital equivalent of a carpool lane, while the rest of your data take the regular highway.

That seems like a good idea, but the technology made little impact in my tests, because many devices don’t yet support the new frequency, 5 GHz. The iPad does, but the iPhone 4 does not, and nor did my older H-P laptop. Moreover, 5 GHz comes with a drawback: its signals usually can’t travel as far through walls as the older technology, transmitting at 2.4 GHz.

Rather than overall speed, the biggest Wi-Fi problem I encountered was getting the network to reach the nooks and crannies of the house. To test that, I compared the ability of each router to stream media to a device like my iPhone in trouble spots, such as my dining room or Mark’s patio.

The results were often stark. To Mark’s upstairs bedroom, the Netgear and Cisco routers could stream a video with ease, but the Apple would sometimes slow to a crawl. When I sent a file over the network to that same spot, the Apple router was sometimes one-tenth the speed of the Netgear and Cisco.

In my urban apartment, only the Netgear router was able without interruption to stream music from an iMac to speakers about 50 feet and five walls away. The music would conk out occasionally with the Cisco router, and quite often with the Belkin and Apple.

And even the Netgear would stumble when I tried the latest feature for the iPhone called AirTunes, which lets you stream media from an iPhone or iPad to the Apple AirPort Express or Apple TV. That technology requires the data to take a longer round trip to its final destination, stressing the network further.

With the Netgear router, I experimented with a setting called “performance mode.” Using it significantly improved the reliability of the network in some parts of my apartment, and put Netgear into a higher class.

But that option, which is sometimes called “channel bonding” or “20/40″ mode, is controversial because it essentially pushes signals from your neighbors’ Wi-Fi networks out of the way.

The Wi-Fi Alliance, which certifies Wi-Fi equipment, said it now requires routers to switch to a neighbor-friendly mode if other networks are around—but this Netgear router was certified prior to that rule. The other router makers say they either don’t offer the option, or automatically downscale when there are neighboring networks.

Wi-Fi technology shouldn’t make me have to choose between my neighbors and my network. A Netgear spokesman told me that in my situation, neighbors aren’t likely to feel an impact, because my impenetrable walls keep the signal from traveling very far anyway.

Being a good neighbor aside, I’d recommend either the Netgear or Cisco routers for users looking to cover a tough space—and hope that the networking industry can come up with even better technology soon. In the meantime, moving a router away from objects that can degrade the signal, like mirrors and refrigerators can help. And the desperate can fall back on a wireless repeater.

Apple Airport Extreme, $179
The most pleasing to look at and simple to install, but suffered from slow transfer speeds and frequently struggled to stream music to difficult locations.

Belkin Play N600HD, $109.99
Acceptable and sometimes impressive file transfer speeds, but often dropped the connection while streaming music.

Netgear WNDR3700, $169.99
The least pretty, but most reliable, especially when using the potentially neighbor-unfriendly ‘performance mode.’

Cisco Linksys E3000, $179.99
Fast in most tests, but sometimes cut out when streaming music. A good option for the less technically inclined

Walter S. Mossberg returns next week.

Write to Geoffrey A. Fowler at geoffrey.fowler@wsj.com

As promised, Kara began BoomTown this week with another Steve Jobs blast from the past, this time at D5. It has all been a big countdown to Steve’s upcoming interview live on stage at D8 this coming Tuesday. It’s not just Jobs though. Head on over to the D8 site to see the full roster of tech execs in line for Kara and Walt’s hot seat. Midweek, Kara got a little video time with Keith Lee, CEO of Booyah games, maker of MyTown, the check-in-based social game that, with two million users, dwarfs Foursquare. The start-up just completed a healthy round of funding and apparently used the money to buy a giant Princess Leia doll…watch the video. Kara ended the week on one of her favorite subjects: Who’s departing this week from Yahoo (YHOO)? Looks like Tapan Bhat, head of the Internet giant’s front page, has left the building. Kara got the exclusive skinny.

John was at the Digital Daily ticker the moment the big story hit. Let us mark this down in our calenders as the week Apple exceeded Microsoft (MSFT) in market capitalization. How do you top a story like that? Well, John does it by following the saga of the social network editor that everyone love to hate at the moment. John gave a blow-by-blow of the privacy changes that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg laid out for his staff. Verdict? Less bad, maybe. To end the week, John covered some of the expectations around the international release of the iPad. Everyone is watching to see if the tablet outsells the Mac and will then proceed to stump about what that means for Apple (AAPL).

Twitter came in for a landing all over MediaMemo on Monday. Peter opened with a post trying to make sense of its new “ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” profit model. The media shuffle is always in Peter’s crosshairs, and this week’s installment was about Forbes buying up True/Slant. Wait…was that a media company acquiring something? Not selling it off? Peter ended his week with a cautionary tale for all this season’s commencement speakers: Don’t plagiarize your speech. Or, if you do, don’t steal it from YouTube. Nothing is more humiliating than being exposed virally.

Walt stepped out of the writer’s chair for Personal Technology this week and gave Geoffrey Fowler a shot at the keyboard. He turned in an insightful piece on the complicated world of e-bookstores and some useful advice on how to navigate their ins and outs.

The whole AllThingsD crew is feverishly preparing this weekend for D8, and even the lowly Weekend Update crew will be getting on a plane bound for LA. We’re packing plenty of sunscreen and NoDoz. Those shouldn’t interact badly…right?

But when Amazon filed its official paperwork about the deal with the SEC today, the company reported 2008 net revenues of just $635 million.

Why the more than $300 million discrepancy?

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The Costco customer program works pretty much like the one that startup Gazelle has offered to everyone for about a year. Enter the make and model of your old gadget (say, a third-generation 8GB iPod Nano) into the Costco Gazelle Web site, and the company tells you how much cash they’ll give you for it ($47, as of Friday, July 17) if you put it in a box and mail it to them. Gazelle then resells your old gear on eBay (EBAY) and to wholesalers–or, if it’s really old, they’ll recycle it for the value of its tech innards.

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It turns out that the person who spent $1,680,300 for lunch with the investment guru wasn’t a person at all: it was Canadian wealth-management firm Salida Capital. It went public about its purchase Wednesday.

Courtenay Wolfe, Salida’s CEO, said that she and a handful of other employees will all share the lunch, which the firm’s partners paid for.

“We think we will be able to gain invaluable insights from his years of experience and current insights and perspectives,” she said. “We think lunch with Warren is going to be a once in a lifetime experience.”

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In May, St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa sued Twitter after someone created a bogus account in his name that featured his photo and what he called “derogatory and demeaning” remarks.

After initially reporting that Twitter was going to reach a settlement with La Russa, the baseball manager’s lawyer filed a short statement in court on June 26 saying that he had dropped the suit–and that Twitter made no payment to him.

A Twitter spokeswoman and La Russa’s lawyer Gregory McCoy didn’t return calls or e-mails seeking comment.

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Many songs are missing the correct album titles and cover art—or just show up in Apple Inc.’s (AAPL) iTunes with mysterious names like “Track04.” Over the years I’ve used several programs to import and buy music, resulting in wild inconsistencies in my collection. I’ve got songs by Beyoncé (with accent), Beyonce (without accent), Beyoncé Knowles (with accent) and Beyonce Knowles (without accent).

Several companies have developed programs that tap into vast databases of songs to tame music collections. I’ve been testing one by San Francisco startup TuneUp Media that’s available to download online and buy in Apple’s stores. While I was reluctant to pay $19.95 for a year’s subscription to a service I reckon should be in iTunes for free, TuneUp has largely delivered on its promise to scrub my music collection with minimal effort, making sure tracks were properly titled and adding extras like album cover art.

TuneUp’s greatest asset is that it works seamlessly with iTunes (for Mac and PC). With TuneUp hooked on to the right side of the iTunes program, you drag “dirty,” or mislabeled, songs into a box identified by a spray bottle of cleaner. The software identifies songs by taking clues from information you’ve embedded in your music, as well as sampling the song’s digital fingerprint. TuneUp looks for a match to those clues in a database of songs maintained by Sony Corp.’s (SNE) Gracenote.

Some matches are a slam dunk, but almost half of my collection proved to be problematic. Of the 500 most-played songs in my pop-oriented collection, TuneUp found “matches” for songs across 79 albums and “likely matches” for songs across 209 albums. It couldn’t identify 10 songs. The company says it counts matches as a 90% or higher chance of a match, and “likely” as at least 75% chance of a match. Songs with a likelihood under 75% are labeled “not found.”

TuneUp gives you the chance to review each of the matches before it adjusts your catalog. (It comes with an undo button.) Accepting all of the sure matches is easy enough, but slogging through the likely matches is troublesome. TuneUp gives you only the option to accept or reject its one recommendation after listening to the file, if you want.I worried that I might be inadvertently mislabeling a song, but haven’t yet found evidence of errors in my collection. The company says it cut out alternative matches to simplify the cleaning process, but is working on adding them to future releases of the software.

Once a song has been cleaned by TuneUp, it is given a consistent name, track number, album cover and other helpful information, such as the year it was released. Now I’ve got songs by just Beyoncé (with accent) and almost all of my songs feature the album cover art that looks so nifty on iPhone screens. The software assigns your songs genre identifications, which can be handy for matching music to your mood. Most of the classifications aren’t terms I would have come up with: Beyoncé is dubbed “urban crossover,” while Michael Jackson is either “disco” or “other pop” depending on the era—but at least they’re consistent. You also can tell TuneUp not to change any specific part of a song’s existing catalog listing, including genre.

TuneUp takes a few seconds, depending on your computer and Internet speed, to identify and re-classify each song. Attempting to scrub a whole collection—mine has more than 10,000 songs—can be a lengthy affair. The company suggests cleaning 500 songs at a time, but you can do many more than that if you leave it running over night.

I tried out a free competitor to TuneUp called MusicBrainz Picard, which matches songs based on a database collected by a swarm of Internet users, rather than one particular company. TuneUp and MusicBrainz, which is run by a nonprofit, are as different as Britannica and Wikipedia in their approaches to cataloging information.

The MusicBrainz approach to building a user-generated database is powerful and has been tapped by companies such as the BBC and Amazon.com (AMZN) to improve the way they keep track of music on their sites. Some of my songs that TuneUp couldn’t identify, such as the song “This Way” by hip hop group Dilated Peoples, were a breeze for MusicBrainz. To date, MusicBrainz has about 700,000 “releases” (such as whole albums) and 8,000,000 individual “tracks” in its database.

But MusicBrainz’s database has limitations, such as the inability to catalog album-cover images or song lyrics, both of which are copyrighted material. The free Picard program lets you tap the MusicBrainz database from your own computer. Serious music fans will be attracted to Picard because it is more precise than TuneUp; Picard guides you to choose from a variety of options when it isn’t certain of a match. But the software is rudimentary and requires concentration and time to use. Picard also doesn’t connect directly into iTunes’ catalog. To use it with iTunes, you have to first clean up all of your music files with Picard and then re-import your songs into iTunes.

I recommend TuneUp for the average music fan who might view cleaning up a music collection as the sort of task that shouldn’t take much longer than one rainy Sunday afternoon. Picard is better for people for whom maintaining an orderly music collection is a never-ending project.

TuneUp comes with a feature called “Tuniverse,” which fills the right side of the screen with information related to whatever song iTunes is playing at the time. That information includes YouTube videos, biographical details from Wikipedia, Google (GOOG) News, music recommendations from Amazon and tickets from StubHub to coming concerts in your area. While I initially worried Tuniverse would feel like added advertising on the screen, I’ve come to enjoy the extra information. And once again, I was left wondering why Apple hasn’t built these capabilities directly into iTunes. I, for one, learned from Tuniverse that Beyoncé has a concert in San Francisco next week, and I just might buy a ticket.

Walt Mossberg is on vacation.

Write to Geoffrey A. Fowler at Geoffrey.Fowler@wsj.com

The investment guru and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway has an annual ritual of auctioning a steak lunch with himself on eBay (EBAY) to raise money for San Francisco’s Glide Foundation. Last year’s winning auction tally of $2.1 million broke all previous records.

Despite many predictions that a lunch with Buffett isn’t worth nearly as much during a recession, the folks at Glide say the pace of this year’s auction is way ahead of last year.

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Amazon.com (AMZN) Thursday unveiled free software for BlackBerry handsets (trackball models only, please), that allow users to browse for products, read reviews, and buy on the go–just like a version for Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone that came out in December.

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Online fraud is becoming so lucrative, said Katherine Hutchison, PayPal’s senior director of global risk management, that it has developed into an industry with specialized players that hire each other in areas such as harvesting credit card numbers and freight forwarding. “A single professional thief doesn’t have to have all of the skills needed to commit fraud,” she said.

Here’s one trick: Fraudsters use telephone services designed for the deaf to get an operator with a friendly (and middle-American) sounding voice to make calls on their behalf to a call center. “The telephone operator could realize this is very likely to be fraud, but they are legally blocked from saying anything other than what the person placing the call tells them to say,” said Hutchison.

Old techniques to track down fraudsters are becoming less helpful, she added.

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On Wednesday, Fujitsu Frontech began selling the world’s first color e-paper e-book reader. Available on April 20 in Japan only, the gadget costs 99,970 yen, or more than $1,000.

Until now, e-books like the Amazon (AMZN) Kindle and Sony (SNE) Reader have been limited to black and white or shades of gray, making them OK for reading plain books and newspapers that like to use stipple drawings, but not great for colorful print media such as magazines.

But if color e-book readers catch on, one theory holds, magazines and other media that currently print on dead trees would have a cheap way to distribute–and charge for–the colorful content and ads that marketers will pay for. Recently, publisher Hearst said it wanted to dive further into the e-book business.

Fujitsu’s color e-paper technology, first unveiled in 2007, is different from the technology created by the Massachusetts-based E Ink that’s used by the Sony and Amazon. But E Ink says it is working on color displays, too.

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Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart announces at a news conference that he has filed suit in U.S. District Court against Craigslist, accusing the site of knowingly promoting and facilitating prostitution.

Said Sheriff Thomas Dart at a news conference: “They’ve actually catered their site so it facilitates (prostitution), where you can actually and more specifically and quickly get to what you want.” He continued: “How is that different than somebody who’s aggressively and actively working with a pimp to try to get the word out about the women working for him?”

Craigslist, in a blog post by chief executive Jim Buckmaster, said that it doesn’t tolerate illegal activity on the site and has taken steps to stop it.

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