“Have you ever heard the expression the customer is always right?Well, here I am – the Customer.”

That is more or less word for word the pivotal sequence in the film Falling Down. Next the main character, played by Michael Douglas, puts up a bag of guns on the counter in the fast food joint he is visiting. Anyway, this is not me loosing track of the theme of my blog. This is all about mobile entertainment and the consumer, who is supposed to pay our salaries and investments at the end of the day.

Well, do we give the consumer a compelling reason to part with his hardly earned cash to buy some complete luxury digital products or services that nobody on this planet really needs? You have probably figured out my position on this, but let me be clear – No way!

I am not talking about the services per se. They are often of very good quality and do provide some loosely defined value at the time of use. Even though the value equation sometimes crashes due to extortionate costs when you add up the premium fee for the service itself and the cost of transporting the data to deliver the service. But the mobile operators’ abuse of their billing monopoly is not the subject of this riff.

Still we put up many roadblocks before we can get the chance to delight our customers. Today I will focus on discovery. How the customer finds all the great services created by this hard working industry. The number of clicks to get to some content and the stunning lack of appropriate search functions on many portals is one of the key reasons we still only have a small dedicated group of customers who are paying our bills. I am stunned over the small number of high spenders that actually make this industry tick. It is a quite small share of users who deliver the majority of the revenues for many mobile entertainment services in the market today.

We loose customers by the millions when we cannot show them to what they want in the first three clicks. How many books would Amazon sell if you had to travel to one of their warehouses and then walk in and look for the book yourself? By the way, the books are not in alphabetical order or any other system you might find useful.

This is a bit crude as an analogy, but not far off the mark either. My point is that if we now finally have handsets that are capable as user interfaces for ok services and WAP settings and other technical hurdles are much lower than two years ago why can’t we get the discovery right?

Search and xhtml are two tools that actually make it possible to present large quantities of content in a tiny screen. I am seeing some good things emerging out there and I hope to see more. My former colleagues at Aspiro make a very good job with their wap portals at the moment. Have a look at wap.inpoc.no for example. I would love to build a hall of fame of good mobile sites so please comment here and prove me wrong!