Sentinel Alert, a cellphone app that can alert companies when an employee has had an accident, won the $15,000 first prize Sunday at Startup Weekend St. John’s, capping off a coming-of-age event for the city’s startup community.

Startup Weekend events have been held in 115 countries and several Atlantic Canadian cities but this was the first one in St. John’s. And the strong turnout and sponsorship were a testament to the work done this year by Startup St. John’s in developing a grassroots-based entrepreneurial community.

“This has been absolutely beyond our expectations,” said Jason Janes, co-founder of Startup St. John’s and an organizer of the Startup Weekend event.

Startup Weekend, an international organization based in Seattle, encourages entrepreneurship by staging 54-hour competitions around the world. People turn up on a Friday night and present their business ideas, usually for a tech startup. Teams form around the best ideas and spend the weekend building the business, ideally producing a barebones product by the time they make a pitch to a panel of judges on Sunday evening.

Sarah Murphy, who presented the pitch for the Sentinel Alert team, said people working alone often fall or have an accident and are left unaided for hours. Sentinel Alert uses a cellphone’s sensors to detect when someone has fallen and instantly alerts the company or its health and safety providers. Murphy said one such provider has already asked the team for a meeting to see if it’s something the organization could use.

Sentinel Alert will receive $15,000 in services to further encourage the group to develop the product into a business.

The runner-up was a company called TIXA, which developed an app that would allow movie theatres to offer discounted last-minute tickets for movies that have not sold out.

The people’s choice award was Tinker, a simple device that uses Wi-Fi to notify people that someone needs assistance. It resembles a big button, and elderly people in a nursing home, for example, could hit it when they need help. It would be cheaper and more flexible than a buzzer at a nurses station, the presenters said.

What was interesting about Startup Weekend St. John’s is 52 people attended, including about 20 developers, but half were not members of Startup St. John’s.

Startup St. John’s is less than a year old but already has more than 200 members, which makes it one of the largest startup groups in the region.

Chris Gardner, founder of the soon-to-open Common Ground co-working space, said the association hopes the tech enthusiasts at Startup Weekend will join and push the membership toward 250.

“I know of three people who came here specifically to vet their ideas (for startups) so this could be a bit of a launch pad for new companies,” he said.

Startup Weekend began Friday night with 29 people standing up and proposing ideas for businesses. The organizers had been worried the participants would not understand how a Startup Weekend works, given that it was the first one in St. John’s. But the fact that more than half the participants came with pitches demonstrated that people understood the event and were prepared, Gardner said.

Coaches and supporters came from Ontario, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, including Startup Weekend facilitator Sally Ng, whose day job is executive director of the Planet Hatch incubator in Fredericton. (I volunteered to attend as one of the four judges.)