COMPUTERS will die, predicts a character in Don DeLillo’s 2003 novel “Cosmopolis”, because they are “melting into the texture of everyday life.” Even the word computer, she concludes, “sounds backward and dumb”. A decade later, as the components of "the computer” become ever more ubiquitous and embedded into so many different products, smartphones have fulfilled much of this prophecy, extending technology deep into the weave of daily life.

Another gadget that is possibly about to weave its way into our lives is a stamp-sized camera that can be worn on any garment and take pictures at 30-second intervals, creating a record of a life that can be searched and shared. Developed by Memoto, a Swedish start-up, the device has an app and cloud-storage platform to ensure that no experience—no matter how mundane—will go undocumented.

Memoto created a stir last year with a campaign on Kickstarter, a crowdfunding platform, to raise $50,000. It raked in more than $500,000. Oskar Kalmaru, one of its founders, says the “the first wave of the buzz” about the camera rolled in ahead of the Kickstarter campaign through a “network of friends around the company”. Memoto had €500,000 ($655,000) in seed funding from Passion Capital, a British venture-capital firm, enabling it to build a prototype camera. Crowdfunding allowed it to raise money before having to fund an expensive manufacturing process. “The alternative would have been to try and raise capital from investors for equity, but it would have been hard and expensive,” explains Mr Kalmaru.

Exposing the product to the public at such an early stage generates unexpected insights. With Memoto’s omnipresent camera it turned out that many potential customers cared fiercely about the privacy and security of their images. The firm dropped plans to have pictures automatically uploaded after a lively debate on Reddit, a web-based discussion board.

And unlike a human photographer, Memoto’s device isn’t capable of asking for permission before snapping. This could run into trouble in countries with strict privacy laws, such as Germany. People living there have been allowed to opt out of Google Street View since April 2009 (though in practice this has been exercised relatively seldom: in the 20 biggest German cities, around 3% of households have opted out).

There are a few other devices on the market that gather personal data on an equivalent scale. The two best-known examples, the Fitbit tracker and Nike’s FuelBand, are both used to monitor health. But Memoto’s cameras gaze outwards, gathering information on the world as well as about ourselves. Memoto says it will inform its customers when they might need another person’s permission to store images of them.

The firm's business model turns on selling hardware and providing access to user-generated content. It will make a profit from selling the 5-megapixel cameras at a stand-alone price, while costs for storage will be covered by a subscription fee. The fee has not yet been set as Memoto is waiting for data on the storage cost per average user. The exact balance between the two revenue streams will be tweaked once it has a better idea on costs and demand. There are no plans to sell advertising around the cloud platform, despite the potential wealth of data that will be created about Memoto users’ habits.

At the start of this month, Memoto had around 2,000 orders from Kickstarter backers and an additional 2,000 orders through its own website. But because of the inevitable teething problems that come with designing brand new software it has had to postpone its first shipping date several times and is now declining to set a launch date. Instead it posts regular progress updates on the firm’s blog. Memoto’s Kickstarter page is filled with largely sympathetic commentary about the delays, including one post from a backer who wants to know whether her camera will be ready in time for a summer hiking trip.

The 2,000-odd pictures that a Memoto camera will take over a day could form an invaluable trove for future historians; a form of self-generated Mass Observation. The firm has already received requests to make the aggregated data available for research. Equally, we might find ourselves pining for the days when photography was more selective. One day, the tedium of viewing a friend’s holiday snaps could be multiplied a thousand-fold.