Picture a familiar scene: It's half seven on a Friday evening, you're heading  away for the Christmas break with all the family in the car. You took a detour to avoid the heavy traffic and have got yourself a bit lost. You're running out of petrol, your wife wants to buy a present for the hosts and the children keep repeating "are we there yet?"

UK PlaceFinder to the rescue! With over 100 categories of different destination types, it takes just a few seconds to find all of the nearby petrol stations, supermarkets, department stores, high street shops and restaurants. If you want to check opening hours or other details then UK PlaceFinder will also phone your chosen destination with the sat-nav's hands free. Avoiding the hassle of calling up directory enquiries and trying to explain which shop you need and in which town.

Entrepreneurs Howard Williams and Ben Lamb, developed the idea after being frustrated that they had such "advanced technology" in the form of a sat-nav but couldn't use it for some very basic tasks. They have assembled together tens of thousands of locations within the UK all listed under a 100 different categories. It's like having a directory service for locations on your sat-nav.

Included in UK PlaceFinder are all the major brands you would expect for Supermarkets, Hotels, Restaurants, Sports Venues, Petrol Stations, Motorway Services, Cafes,  Cinemas, Attractions, High Street stores, Department Stores, Clothes Shops,  DIY shops, Pubs and Clubs, Gyms and other large retailers. Added to this are also the more hard to find locations such as Car Parks, Congestion Zones, London Underground Stations, Blue Flag Beaches, Hairdressers, Builder and Plumbing Merchants, Camera Shops, National Trust Sites, Industrial Estates, Shopping Centres and Retail Parks.

As Howard explains: "Because UK PlaceFinder has the locations already setup for you, all you do is select the one you need from 100 different categories, each with thousands of possible locations. You can use this as your destination, for instance, finding a nearby beach as well as useful places near your destination like a car park for the beach. You can also find places on your route, for instance where to eat a pub lunch on your way to a cricket match."

UK PlaceFinder costs £12.99 and is a comprehensive collection of useful Points of Interest covering the whole of the UK. UK PlaceFinder is an add-on and can be used with all major sat-nav brands. It can be bought on-line at www.ukplacefinder.com and is supplied as a download or on a CD ROM.

Co-founder Ben Lamb said:  "to try and sum up our product, you could say that UK PlaceFinder is what Santa would use if he didn't have the ever reliable Rudolph!"