NFC + HCE Your phone in an interactive world

Host card emulation is gaining steam in the Industry with Visa and Mastercard now backing the technology for Mobile payments. Since KitKat, when HCE was introduced with little fanfare, we've gotten inundated with questions and guidance from large firms across multiple industries. Many want to know what we are trying to to with NFC/HCE, how we're looking to position the technology, and how they can leverage it in their use cases. Interested parties range from building access, loyalty programs, payments, mass transit, airlines, banking, etc.
This would be a great opportunity to highlight how we came about with our approach for HCE, as opposed to an embedded secure element approach, why we think its great and how people get get started making applications now that large players have thrown their hats into the ring.