Vurve offers advertising on autopilot

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For small businesses, advertising can be a nightmare. How much to spend? Where to go? Online or print? (Is that old-fashioned of us to ask?)

That’s where Vurve comes in. The company, which launched Tuesday after a private beta phase, purports to offer ‘advertising on autopilot’ to small businesses.

Here’s how it works: You sign up for the service and tell Vurve how much you’d like to spend per month, from $200 to $10,000 (the upper limit the company will allow from customers per month). Then Vurve comes into play -- by creating ads, placing them on sites like Facebook and Google and steadily improving the client’s ad strategy.

The company’s technology analyzes which ads work and where they are placed, figuring out what recipe of search, display, social and shopping engine advertising will be most effective. If most of your widgets are sold through Facebook ads, for example, Vurve will give you the breakdown and move more ad money into the social networking site.

Founded by Amit Kumar, Yahoo’s former director of product, Vurve raised $1.2 million in venture capital funding last year.

‘Roughly 75% of small businesses would rather do taxes than advertising,’ Kumar said. ‘We figured that people that have that much money can get all the help they need. We want to do it for the small guy.’

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-- Shan Li