All too often those of us here in Silicon Valley congratulate ourselves for living on the cutting edge of technology. We all have neighbors who work for either companies with household names or unfamiliar start-ups, around whose work there is a great deal of secrecy — until there’s a flashy story in the Wall Street Journal.

Sometimes it can be hard to keep up, which is why every year I attend the day-long technology “boot camp” sponsored by the Silicon Valley Small Business Development Center, part of the U.S. government’s Small Business Administration. For $49, it’s the most cost-effective resource I’ve run across, because I’m sure that it would cost thousands of dollars to learn the same thing at other seminars.

We learned about issues most likely to affect our businesses, such as cloud computing, how Skype works, and how those and other technologies are changing the economics of small business. But a couple of days later, I started having a nagging feeling that something was missing. Several years ago, I heard Scott McNealy, former chairman of Sun Microsystems (now a division of Oracle), say, “People don’t want computers. They just need them to get what they do want.” McNealy wanted to figure out a way to deliver the information and essentially make the computer invisible. (I hope he wasn’t thinking about human-chip implants.)

I don’t want to sound cynical, because the Internet has made it easier than ever before for entrepreneurs like me to start businesses. But it seems to me that the Internet has only provided about half of what the real estate industry needs. It’s revolutionized the ability to find and finance homes. Even at DBNR, we can now post a video about our houses at a single site and have it syndicated — that is, distributed automatically — to dozens of other sites. It’s an amazing time savings.

So what’s missing? Context. Context is one of the things we need most about DBNR property. Certainly, we can find out the basics about a property: who owns it, the property taxes, the water bill. But we can’t find out what the neighbors are like. We can’t find out what the traffic is like. We can’t find out whether businesses are coming into the neighborhood, or fleeing. We need context.

Technology does not yet have a way to deliver what I call human-centered research. If you walked into any neighborhood where DBNR owns a house, you’d be able to discern almost immediately the feeling of the neighborhood, whether there are kids running down the street, or elderly grandmothers rolling their groceries home from a local market. Even then, we would need a method to gauge the source of the contextual information, based on trust, an issue I have strong feelings about and have written about frequently.

Technology is great. But it’s not perfect.