(FORTUNE Small Business) – The telephone celebrated its 124th birthday this year. The Web is six years old. Thanks to a host of startups building wireless and voice Web applications, the Web and the telephone are becoming the ultimate May/December romance. And not since Sonny met Cher has there been such a bad marriage.

This Web-on-the-phone boomlet has two components--accessing the Web via mobile phones and getting Web content via any telephone. Do these offer the same biz growth opportunities the "old" Web has?

Let's start with the wireless Web. According to the wireless-research firm Ovum, 66% of today's U.S. cell-phone users (more than 60 million people) say they aren't interested in wireless Web access. This is not surprising when you consider the bland offerings, such as weather and shopping. The phone part of the cell phone (remember that?) can handle this stuff better.

Many wireless startups think that the "killer app" to turn that statistic around is location-based services. A new spin on the yellow pages, the idea is to push directory information based on where customers are and what's closest to them. For example, Go2online.com has standard yellow-pages info, and $250 a year buys you a wireless presence on its service.

Go2's appealing because it's done the hard part in getting on the directory menus of carriers Sprint, Verizon, and Nextel. The easy access to Go2 on so many phones gives customers a shot at finding you. If you build your own wireless site, only former CIA operatives well versed in tapping out codes (hit the number 2 three times for C) will be typing in your Web address on the phone keypad.

Ah, if only it really worked. Go2's president and founder Lee Hancock acknowledged that his data is only about 70% accurate. When searches in the Manhattan outskirts sent me miles into the city, I realized he wasn't kidding. Not good enough.

Like location services on Web phones, the voice Web is also about giving consumers yellow-pages info based on where they are. And it's not as great as it seems on paper either. Services such as TellMe (800-555-TELL) and BeVocal (800-4-B-VOCAL) offer limited business-related opportunities right now. TellMe lets users search for restaurants and taxis; BeVocal plans to have a business finder and will sell preferred listings.

These services use speech recognition software to do the dirty work, which is neat if you forgive that it doesn't work. Businesses, city names, and even simple commands (i.e., stop) are often misunderstood. And TellMe found only one diner in my New York City zip code! Even the most casual Seinfeld fan knows that can't be right.

If you own a walk-in business such as a restaurant, $250 for a Go2 listing plus the cost of premium placement on the voice sites (they won't say how much) could be a decent low-cost investment, even if the services are disappointing today. For anyone else, remember what we called m-commerce and v-commerce six months ago? An 800 number.

Online furniture e-tailer living.com shuttered its double doors. The official reason? "Circumstances beyond our control." And it was my fault when living.com shipped my order twice and spent two months sorting out the mess. Sorry!...I got invited to an event promising to teach me "which communications tactics still work on the Net." The e-mail greeting read, "Hello, Unspecified." Lesson one: The personal touch is underrated. Hello, delete key...

Don't believe the hype? E-mail david_lidsky@timeinc.com.