With a flash of a smart card, owners at The Island Club – a R400m luxury apartment complex currently under construction, will be able to gain access to the development, purchase a cooldrink from a vending machine, operate washing machines in the laundrettes, purchase pre-paid electricity and, in time, possibly even make purchases at other retail outlets within the complex.

The ADO CashCard can also act as a virtual security or safety guard allowing varying levels of entry within the complex to residents and visitors.

For example there is a central Island with a swimming pool which can be accessed by outside visitors at certain times during the day. Linking this island with the private residential apartments are three bridges and visitor cards will be programmed to prevent outsiders from having access to these parts of the development.

The cards can also be programmed to limit the access of unattended young children to certain areas of the development including communal facilities such as the gym or swimming pools which might pose a danger to them.

And that is not all. Island Club owners will be able to use their same ADO CashCard to pay for parking when they go into the Cape Town CBD or when holidaying in Hermanus or Knysna or any other municipality linked to the system. They will also shortly be able to use it to pay for parking at a number of shopping centres in the Western Cape.

This open platform smartcard technology – the first of its kind in South Africa - has been developed by ADO, the company which introduced the first ADO CashCard for parking in the Cape Town CBD six years ago.

Adriaan Oosterberg, managing director of ADO, said other smartcard platforms in operation worked in a closed system configuration and as such could not be used across multi-purpose applications.

"This is the very first broad-based multi-application CashCard which can perform several independent functions while at the same time giving the card holder a seamless user interface that is standard across all uses. This is also the first time these functions have been extended to include access control," he said.

He said there was no limit to the applications that could be incorporated into this open platform system and it would be possible to extend it to restaurants and retail outlets in the Island Club complex if they so wished.

Oosterberg said the ADO CashCard had been in use in Cape Town since 1998 and had proven to be a reliable and versatile smart card payment system with more than 350 000 users in the Western Cape, a number which was growing at a rate of four to five thousand per month.

He said they were talking to other Century City businesses who were keen to embrace this new technology and which would see Century City become " a truly smart city".

John Chapman of Rabie Property Projects, the developers of The Island Club and the majority shareholder in a new company which has acquired the property business and undeveloped land at Century City, said they had taken the strategic step of incorporating this latest access control technology into the Island Club to further enhance the convenient lifestyle the development offered buyers.

Century City itself, he said, had been at the forefront of hi-tech development with many leading Information Technology companies having established head or regional offices there. It is also home to the likes of the MTN ScienceCentre, South Africa’s first fully-fledged science and technology entertainment centre.

Chapman said many of the big IT companies at Century City were utilizing fibre optic technology and provision had been made in the Century City infrastructure for further rollout of this technology if there were the demand for it.