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It looks like Amazon.com is expanding its Lockers program, which allows customers to have their deliveries sent to, yes, nearby lockers. The idea was first reported last fall. It may seem like an inconvenient alternative to home delivery at first — until you think about some of the headaches that can come up, like worrying one of your neighbors will swipe the package as it's sitting on your doorstep, or making sure you're at home to sign for it. With Amazon Lockers, the package sits securely at a nearby pick-up station, until you come by at your convenience (well, as long as it's within three days of delivery) and open the locker up with a special code.

It looks like Amazon.com is expanding its Lockers program, which allows customers to have their deliveries sent to, yes, nearby lockers. The idea was first reported last fall. It may seem like an inconvenient alternative to home delivery at first — until you think about some of the headaches that can come up, like worrying one of your neighbors will swipe the package as it's sitting on your doorstep, or making sure you're at home to sign for it. With Amazon Lockers, the package sits securely at a nearby pick-up station, until you come by at your convenience (well, as long as it's within three days of delivery) and open the locker up with a special code.

Codecademy, the startup offering online lessons and tools to help people learn how to code, is adding Python to its lesson line-up starting today. Until now, co-founder Zach Sims says Codecademy has "been focused on client-side languages and markup - javascript, HTML, and CSS." Starting today, you'll be able to find user-generated Python lessons on the site, and Sims adds, "This is the beginning of new language support on Codecademy - Python is only the first server side language you'll see."

Codecademy, the startup offering online lessons and tools to help people learn how to code, is adding Python to its lesson line-up starting today. Until now, co-founder Zach Sims says Codecademy has "been focused on client-side languages and markup - javascript, HTML, and CSS." Starting today, you'll be able to find user-generated Python lessons on the site, and Sims adds, "This is the beginning of new language support on Codecademy - Python is only the first server side language you'll see."

Stephen Elliott, founder and editor-in-chief of a literary website called The Rumpus, has found a modern-day audience for old-school letters. His site, a mixture of old-world letter writing and the modern web, is called Letters In The Mail and it aims to further disrupt the way we think about publishing. Elliott is a writer, filmmaker (his movie About Cherry comes out later this year), and occasional teacher He started The Rumpus in 2009, and it has evolved into a mix of reviews, interviews, the popular "Dear Sugar" advice column, with lots of other content. (I took a class from Elliott when I was in college, and also conducted a couple of interviews for the site in its early days.)

As startups struggle to hire top-notch talent, several startups (like Interview Street and Coderwall) have emerged with a focus on recruiting developers. Now a company called TheLions is offering a similarly-focused approach to the world of sales. For most startups, salespeople are almost as important as the technical team, since they're the ones who bring in revenue. Since its founding in 2010, TheLions quietly built a data-driven approach to sales recruiting for startups — founder Matt McGraw says his company finds sales "lions" who rate highly on loyalty, performance, pedigree, and talent. TheLions already has customers on the recruiting side of the business, so now it's taking the technology and applying it to the opposite problem, namely helping salespeople identify the best companies to work for.

Thomson Reuters announced today that it has made a deal to acquire a brand protection company called MarkMonitor for an undisclosed sum. The MarkMonitor website says the company offers a suite of products and services that include brand protection (i.e., protecting trademarks and commerce), anti-piracy, anti-fraud, and domain management. The Wikimedia Foundation recently moved all of its sites from GoDaddy to MarkMonitor (as noted by The Next Web). The company says it serves more than half of brands on the Fortune 100.

Same-day shipping is reported to be a key part of Amazon.com's current strategy, but CFO Tom Szkutak offered a partial denial of those rumors during today's conference call discussing the company's second quarter earnings. "We don't really see a way to do same-day delivery on a broad scale economically," Szkutak said.

Memolane, a startup that helps users archive and explore their content across social networks, has been working to make it easier to share that content, for example by allowing users to share "lanes" with their Facebook friends. Now, founder Eric Lagier says publishers, brands, and anyone else should have an easy time featuring that content on their own websites, through an improved embed feature and WordPress plugin. When someone signs up for Memolane, they connect the social network accounts of their choice, then the site creates a single timeline highlighting the content from all of those accounts. (One of the more fun features, though less relevant for this article, is the fact that Memolane sends you emails reminding you what you were doing a few months or a year ago.) You can also create lanes around specific events or topics by filtering based on tags or dates.

Here's a quick update to yesterday's story about the legal fight between the makers of two similarly named products — location service Pinwheel (which was built by a new startup from Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake) and photo-sharing app Pinweel. A New York court granted a preliminary injunction against the use of the Pinwheel name, basically siding with Pinweel's argument that it came first, and that consumers might confuse the two products. At the time, Fake declined to comment on how she would respond, since it's an ongoing legal matter. However, the Pinwheel.com site now redirects to 2bkco.com — 2bkco being the name of Fake's actual startup — and it no longer mentions the Pinwheel brand. (There's also a message saying that the service is "down for scheduled maintenance".)