This should be interesting. The BBC are tracking an individual shipping container as it travels round the world transporting cargo for a year. Hopefully this will also include the type of goods it carries as it's put to work.

I didn't realise until a couple of years ago how something seemingly mundane was the main component in a complex system that has had a profound impact on our world. I haven't read this yet but it's on my list: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger.

Thing is, when something becomes a standard it can start to influence other areas of innovation such as the  datacentre-in-a-box concept that has done the rounds. The latest version of this is Google's patent on stacking a load of these at sea to be cooled and powered by the waves. I've read how when Google started they piled bare bones systems in plastic desk drawers and just left them, it being cheaper to add more capacity than spend time swapping out faulty units. This idea has now been scaled-up  to the size of entire containers that are only swapped out when a certain number of modules fail. As our demand for additional capacity increases so the solutions for answering that demand scale accordingly.