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It's every hockey parent's nightmare. It's Saturday morning and your budding young Sidney Crosby has a tournament in some far-off village you've never visited. Worse still, you have no idea where the arena is or how to find the closest Tim Hortons for that all-important morning double-double.

POIfriend Inc. has its sights set on becoming the best friend to thousands of Canadians like you — one personal point of interest and GPS screen at a time.

The fledgling Ontario company (whose name is pronounced like boyfriend, except with a 'p') runs a free Web-based community at POIfriend.com where users can upload their favourite POIs — points of interest — onto social maps and then download their collected landmarks to their own mobile GPS device.

Think of it as circling important addresses on a digital map and then having the ability to take your personalized map wherever you go, on your GPS-enabled device of choice.

You simply plug your personal navigation device or cellphone into your computer, download the POIs you want and then hit the road with all the locations now available through your device.

What started out as a way for enthusiasts of GPS and personal navigation devices to plan road trips, or share their favourite restaurants with other users, has rapidly turned into a marketing sensation, with corporate Canada lining up at the doors of the tiny five-employee company in Oakville.

Although POIfriend was founded just last January, its co-creators, Bill McLean and Dave Krawczyk, both 41, have already amassed an impressive cadre of more than 30 corporate partners. These range from Tim Hortons Inc. and Canadian Tire Corp. Ltd. to Bank of Nova Scotia and Shoppers Drug Mart Corp.

The companies pay POIfriend to include the locations of their retail outlets and branches in the site's database, so that users can download and find the closest drug store or coffee shop quickly. POIfriend declined to say just how much it is making from each deal.

"Things are moving very quickly for us," says Mr. McLean, who was the general manager for Carlson Wagonlit Travel in Canada and a Procter & Gamble Co. veteran before founding POIfriend.

"This [the mobile industry] is a very fast-moving space and what the user base defines as a requirement today is constantly changing," he notes.

"We have always said we would stay true to our focus and that if the masses in the community identify something that will deliver benefit to them, staying true to that is our biggest focus."

POIfriend's founders see their free service as a way for people to come together and share information about their favourite shops, restaurants and other physical destinations such as ski hills or hiking trails.

Users can create their own groups such as "Arizona bookstores" or "Plane-watching at Toronto Airport" which details the best viewing locations for aviation aficionados.

The POIfriend founders see the service as appealing to anyone travelling to a new city who wants to not only get around town quickly, but also be able to find the kinds of places they're interested in.

For example, if you live in Halifax and are making a business trip to Vancouver, you could create a file on POIfriend.com, plug in the location of your hotel, your business meetings and the restaurants you hope to visit, and then simply download your personalized map to your mobile device.

Tim Hortons now has a link on its corporate website that points users to POIfriend. A few clicks of the mouse and your digital map will be dotted with the location of every Tim's eatery from Newfoundland to British Columbia.

Scotiabank, like many of its financial rivals, including Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, is planning to add a POI for each of its branches and banking machines. But Scotiabank has also paid to include the location of every minor hockey arena in Canada as part of its ScotiaHockey promotion.

Together, such sponsors not only form a formidable resource for hockey parents and travellers in general, but the corporate deals are also indicative of the support POIfriend is enjoying at the point when most Web-based start-ups are usually still trying to figure out how to make money from their service.

The biggest challenge for POIfriend is ensuring that its POIs can reach as many of the emerging mobile platforms as possible — a daunting task for a small company trying to make information available to various devices and services that all need to talk to each other.

The service is already compatible with various personal navigation devices produced by companies such as Garmin Ltd. and TomTom International BV, and it also works with Research In Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry devices and BlackBerry Maps technology, Apple Inc.'s iPhone and the social networking site Facebook.

"There are always challenges in bringing things together and making sure things talk to each other," Mr. McLean explains.

"But at the core, if you have a well-designed and well thought-out database that is flexible, it becomes a little easier to plug these additional tables and additional features in."

The company's central database of POIs now contains more than 2.4 million destinations, many of which were created by the site's growing user base. Last month, POIfriend.com boasted more than 60,000 unique visitors and more than 30 corporate sponsors, many of which have signed on in the last 90 days.

Although many POIfriend users and partners are based in Canada, the site also has a loyal and growing following in both the United States and United Kingdom.

While the corporate sponsorships are great for POIfriend's cash flow, the real strength of the service lies in the users, says Mr. Krawczyk a former technology consultant who once worked with companies such as Ford Motor Co. and Coca-Cola Co.

In fact, the Tim Hortons group of POIs was started by one of the site's users before the company signed on to sponsor and update those listings.

"Tim Hortons and the user were quite happy to have that changed to official status on our site," Mr. Krawcyzk says.

Unlike other Canadian start-ups chasing venture capital, Mr. McLean and Mr. Krawczyk say POIfriend is financed entirely out of their own pockets and those of an unnamed private investor.

And although the company hasn't ruled out a series-A round of funding, it's not part of the short-term strategy.

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POIfriend at a glance

• What it is: POIfriend.com is a free website community where you can upload your favourite points of interests (POIs) such as bars and restaurants onto social maps and then download them to your own GPS-enabled mobile device.

• How it works: Plug your cellphone or personal navigation device into your computer, download the POIs you want and then hit the road. The personalized selections, tailored to your own interests and activities will appear superimposed on the device's digital maps.

• Why it's popular: Regular GPS systems will guide you to a specified destination, but you need to know the address. If you're looking for "a sushi restaurant" but don't know the address, a standalone GPS device isn't much help. By downloading a selection of sushi POIs to your device, you have many choices at your fingertips. POIfriend also allows users to collect, rate and share up-to-date information on a wide variety of places or activities.