The trickle of rumors about the forthcoming Apple wearable is becoming a torrent. Rather than cluttering the site with every one, here’s a roundup of what people think they know as of Monday’s East Coast start of business:
1. There’ll be an app store for the iWatch and major software developers have been seeded with an SDK. This doesn’t really qualify as news so much as Duh. The only question will be who’s on the stage with Apple execs.
2. It may not be called the iWatch. This is likely, although the actual product name is anyone’s guess. Our current favorite guess is the iBand, because that will allow them to have a big-name rock band at the debut. (This is a regular feature of big Apple announcements, and the Beats acquisition implies that Beats exect Jimmy Iovine could get any band on earth to show. We saw rumors about U2.
3. Apple will finally embrace NFC with the iWatch and the iPhone, a powerful combination with beacon technology. Rather than sending credit card information in the clear, though, we believe the reporting that has Apple using tokenization tech to protect payment data.
4. Along those lines, Apple has cut deals with card processors and card issuers to have its payment system be treated as Card Present transactions, which are far cheaper to process than Card Not Present transactions, which is how most of online commerce is treated.
