Seven short weeks ago, we announced Singularity University at TED2009.

The launch was extremely well covered — we were on the front page of the Financial Times globally and there were several hundred original stories about it all over the world. Ray was on Fox news and Wolf Blitzer had us over to CNN’s LA studios. And it hasn’t stopped – BusinessWeek has a nice story on us this week. And of course, along with all the positive stories, there was some constructive criticism as well. One post, by Jamais Cascio, was particularly lucid. We had a good phone call with Jamais and he had a couple of great ideas which we’ve since implemented.

The biggest surprise, though, has been the student response. We’ve received applications from over 70 countries worldwide, with almost 50% coming from outside the U.S. — we’ll analyze the numbers and give a breakdown at a later date.

This weekend, we’re gathering all the track chairs and key advisors for our second Curriculum Planning Meeting (CPM2). It’s a key event where the track chairs will discuss which interdisciplinary topics to focus on during the 9-week curriculum. It promises to be enthralling.

Tomorrow evening (Friday), we’ll have a reception and will try and broadcast that live. Stay tuned to our Twitter feed for details if you want to see what’s going on.