Mozilla has announced the winners of its February DevDerby which challenged contestants to produce demos for multi-touch interaction using the Touch Events API.

Commenting on the month's entries on Mozilla Hacks, DevDerby manager John Karahalis, who stood in for one of the contest's three judges on this occasion, said:

Naming just a few winners is always difficult, but the task was especially hard this time around. Just about every demo I came across impressed me more than the last, and I know our other judges faced a similar dilemma. Our winners managed to take a relatively familiar form of interaction and create experiences that were more creative, more fun, and more visually stunning than we would have ever predicted.

First place, for which the prize is a Samsung Android device was awarded to a newcomer to this monthly competition for Touchcycle, a multiplayer game for up to 4 players with deceptively simple gameplay:

Pick the color of the Cycle you want to control by holding down your finger near the color of your choice. When the Cycles start running, they will simply follow your fingers across the Grid. TouchCycles traveling across the Grid will leave a trail behind them. These trails will destroy your Cycle if you crash into one, so make sure that you avoid all the existing trails while trying to make your friends crash.

Second place, winning its creator a hand-crafted laptop messenger bag was for Multitouch Boids and third place, with a limited edition MDN Tee-Shirt as the prize, was awarded for  Last Blog Standing.

All fifteen submissions for February's contest can be viewed and you can also download  their source files.

If you are inspired to enter, DevDerby is open to "almost anybody". The rules state you have to be the age of majority in your country of residence although minors of 13 years or older who reside in the U.S. and minors in certain other countries, depending on local laws, are also eligible but will be required to submit a signed parental consent form. The contest is also void in countries subject to a U.S. boycott or where prohibited by law and the usual restrictions apply about not being employed by Mozilla or its partners.

A new contest starts on the first day of every month and closes on the last day using US Pacific time and entries must be compatible with and function properly in a current version of Firefox, Firefox Beta or Firefox Aurora, without requiring plug-ins. Although the entries that we tried also worked fine in Chrome.

It is probably to late to make a submission for March's DevDeby, which is about mobile in general and invites devs to build amazing experiences for users on the go, but Mozilla has already announced the topics for the following two.

April's is to use  Web Workers to created user interfaces that cope with computationally-intensive tasks and May's is about getUserMedia to access the cameras and microphones of users - what can you do with this media?

This is all fairly cutting edge stuff as many of the APIs that are in use are still under development. They are also essential to the forth coming FireFox OS which means you get a chance to get ahead on this platform.