The creator, Michael Shirley, describes it like this: "The device is triggered by a reed-switch sensor that monitors magnetic proximity. The signal is sent through an Arduino board to a Processing sketch, which tells the computer to snap a webcam photo of Peterson and upload it to Twitpic with a saying chosen from a pool of prewritten zingers. The Twitpic post is immediately loaded to the BossTracker5000?s Twitter feed. Voila! A chair that tweets." Most importantly, it also updates when the boss is away.