You've trawled the Web for hours, rummaging through support forums, official documentation, and expert blogs for the elusive answer to a nagging technical problem. What do you do next?

Get free real-time support from an expert listed on Qunu.com, says Capetonian co-founder, Helmar Rudolph. The site has signed up nearly 1 400 experts since its launch on 8 June, and has hosted about 6 500 live help sessions.

The website connects users to experts using a web-based Jabber client. Users search for experts on a particular topic -- "linux", "php" or "ubuntu", for instance -- and experts with those tags are listed. Click on an expert, and if he/she is willing to take your call, your chat session begins immediately, with no registration required.

It's a service that relies on people who are "passionate" about helping others -- and judging by its early popularity, there are plenty of those. "We are gathering people that are really just interested in helping out," says Rudolph. "It's not about ego."

The website was supposed to launch quietly and slowly build its user base during alpha testing, says Rudolph, but Digg effectively ended that idea. "Someone put this thing up on Digg and that was the end of it. We got flooded," says Rudolph.

"The first one was three days after we launched. The first day was 300 searches, the second day was 600 searches, and when we got Dugg it was all of a sudden 6 200 searches."

Things have since settled down, with the site averaging between 100 and 200 help sessions a day, a good return for a website still in alpha testing, says Rudolph.

Some of its hits could have resulted from its rather ambiguous name. "[Qunu] in French means 'naked ass'," he chuckles, "but that wasn't our intention."

The website founders actually wanted the website name to be Quna.com, as in "Q 'n A", but the company holding the domain wanted to sell it for a lump of cash. So the team settled for Qunu, which is also coincidentally the small Eastern Cape village where Nelson Mandela spent much of his childhood.

Development on Qunu started in 2003, after Rudolph shared his brainchild with Australian "serial entrepreneur" Murray Gray. Gray managed to get American developer Justin Kirby on board, and the rest is history.

The team first toyed with using Mozilla as a base for the application. "And that cost us a lot of time and a lot of money. We dropped it, because we realised we wouldn't get anywhere. The user interface was ugly, Mozilla was creating far too many problems and [the Mozilla development team was] not able to deliver anything that was even remotely useful."

"So we dumped it and we said, 'bugger this, [let's go with] Web 2.0', because then we only have browser issues."

New features in the pipeline include a number of translations, an expert-rating feature, and a knowledge-base to store past support chat sessions.

"The moment we add the wiki to it, that keeps the knowledge, so that our experts don't answer the same thing twice, then it almost doubles in value overnight. Because then you have the chat access, but you also have access to what has been said before," says Rudolph.

So how does Qunu.com plan to make money? Although the team has approached venture capitalists in the USA, none have agreed to fund the project. So they are now forging ahead with their own revenue model.

First to be implemented will be a service for experts to advertise their professional services online. But instead of pay-per-click, it will be based on "pay-per-chat".

"You indicate on your search that you are looking for professional help, and then those experts show up ... It's brilliant, because if you're looking for help, you can check out two or three people before you commit," enthuses Rudolph.

The "Qunu Contractors" will pay a small fee for each chat session that is initialised by a potential client.

There are also plans for a paid chat service in the similar vein to Google Answers, "if someone needs an answer right now, but is willing to pay for it," says Rudolph.

And what about the venture capitalists? "If we show them that we can make money with this thing, then it is also easier to get money," says Rudolph. "It's like that with the banks. You have to show that you don't need the money and then they give it to you."